Album Review: Une Misère – Sermon

An intoxicating violence spirals inwards at the centre of this furious debut album from Iceland’s Une Misère. Alive with seismic weight and desolate, blackened beauty, Sermon channels the barren aesthetic of their homeland for a trip into the darkest recesses of the human psyche.

If their indulgently melancholic moniker wasn’t telling enough, on-the-nose song titles like Sin & Guilt, Beaten and Burdened / Suffering waymark a descent into deepest darkness. Thankfully, their blend of blackened hardcore and steely aggression reveals itself with a tad more subtlety.

The circle-pit velocity of the title-track and sheer savagery of Failures’ beatdowns underline their reputation as a ferocious live proposition, but there is far more at play than blunt force here. Overlooked / Disregarded channels its weight through passages of near-ambient post-metal, Fallen Eyes displays proggy flourishes amongst the anguish, while grandstanding closer Voiceless packs in elements of industrial and tech-death.

They’re the superbly shifting faces of a brutalist force on the rise.

Verdict: 4/5