Gradience – Anomaly
Gradience – Anomaly
Metal Blade Records
Release date: 04/09/26
Review by: Jon Deaux
7.5/10
Anomaly plays like two guys got drunk at a wedding and decided genre boundaries were somebody else’s problem — rough around the edges, occasionally overstuffed, and mean enough to leave a mark.
Here’s the thing about Copenhagen weddings – somebody always gets so intoxicated they start their very own band. Normally, this results in an embarrassing tale one only hears at the divorce proceedings. In this case, it gave rise to Anomaly, an album of 11 songs in the genre of dark rap-metal, created by people united by similar trauma and a refusal to stick to one niche alone.
Jakob Harris roars in a manner reminiscent of some creature dredged from a Danish bog and enraged beyond comprehension, while Gavin Mistry raps like he’s trying his chances in a competition to find the most depressing cypher on Earth. Vermin starts the fight with the sound of deathcore breakdown hijacked by a trap beat, and there’s absolutely nothing gimmicky about it – it just sounds violent and vicious – that’s the whole point.
Both Blame Me and Agony are unpretentiously harsh and abrasive. Mistry describes the issues faced by the immigrants and the feeling of teenage isolation, along with the experience of feeling invisible and ignored, and it feels like reading somebody else’s diary entries meant never to be exposed to daylight. Nothing like that would be used as a promotional slogan by the artist.
Gradience gets seriously nasty on the Master to the Slave track – here, the obsession with domination moves from the heavy metal drama to some sort of horror movie scenario. From By Stains and Deathwish onwards, rapping and drumming stop competing with one another for space – it’s only a continuous flow of pounding double-bass behind Mistry’s lyrics which eventually becomes inseparable.
There comes a track called Slow, that’s actually, well, slow. Nothing like an acoustic guitar hostage taken before the start of the breakdown – it’s just a welcome relief and perhaps the smartest move the band made – showing what they are capable of: changing the pace of their music.
Tracks Undone and A Witness come through poorly – you can see how the band attempts to balance between screaming, flowing, and melodic parts of songs, and it feels obvious how the band tries to achieve that balance. However, there is always something that pulls it right back, and White Noise takes the blood back into it. And then Grimey Potential wraps up the album, giving an ambiguous meaning to its name.
Chris Kreutzfeldt’s production preserves enough grime in everything he worked on, providing guitars with a necessary heaviness without transforming it into some kind of background wallpaper, leaving actual cracking on drum skins and Mistry’s voice being placed somewhere in the center of it all. The work of four musicians recorded at one studio – you can hear that it’s true.
This album is loaded with ideas and occasionally suffers from the desire to prove its diversity and richness – trying to figure out what part of this collision should go further. Still, there’s not a hint of embarrassment in the works of Gradience – the guys definitely know what they do and what they want.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Vermin
02. Blame Me
03. Agony
04. Master to the Slave
05. Stains
06. Deathwish
07. Slow
08. Undone
09. A Witness
10. White Noise
11. Grimey Potential
LINKS:
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