FUOCO FATUO
Italy’s Fuoco Fatuo are an elusive entity in European extreme metal, creators of an aphotic and otherworldly strain of hallucinatory and ultra-suffocating funeral doom that has few equals around. Hailing from Varese in northern Italy, the band started out in 2012, emerging as one of Italy’s most promising sludge/doom bands through a solid string of demos and EPs that established them in the local underground as a true force of nature in the realm of slow and oppressive music. However their 2014 debut LP “The Viper Slithers in the Ashes of What Remains” issued by Iron Tyrant and Caligari Records introduced the band as a morphed entity, as tempos got even slower and elements borrowed from black and death metal as well as from drone, and dark ambient pushed their sound deeper into the realms of scarier strains of extreme metal, particularly funeral doom. This change in direction was consolidated and reached its full accomplishment on 2016’s imposing sophomore LP and debut offering for Profound Lore Records “Backwater”, and even more so on their colossal 2021 third LP “Obsidian Katabasis”. Over the last few years both of these pachydermic albums have set a new standard of extremism and opened the gates to a completely unexplored realm of heaviness and sonic oppression that has established Fuoco Fatuo as one of the most cataclysmic and inhumanly crushing bands to have emerged in the European extreme metal underground in recent years.