The saxophone is quite a powerful instrument when it is used in a somewhat unorthodox fashion, or a musical environment it is not typically associated with, like in a technical death metal song. I would even go so far as to claim it has led to a renaissance in creativity, revitalizing the whole genre to a degree. If the new RIVERS OF NIHIL album has not yet convinced you, let me add another recent case in point: “The Great Filters,” released by the French prog-tech death-metal squad, FRACTAL UNIVERSE. The album was released on April 4th, 2025, but it slipped past my musical radar entirely until I stumbled upon it just now. The band has been inching closer and closer to progressive metal with each new album until 2021’s “The Impassable Horizon” hit the jackpot head-on. This new endeavor picks up from where it left off and further gears up on both progressive and atmospheric twists and turns – and cool saxophone licks! While RIVERS OF NIHIL‘s new outing puts their most brutal face forward on quite a few songs, FRACTAL UNIVERSE sets out to feather their tech-metal nest with all sorts of shiny tinkers from the HAKEN prog shop in even more astounding fidelity than on their previous album. It is pretty impossible not to be completely captivated by the charms of this beauty.
Opener “The Void Above” kicks with a somewhat Ihsahn-like riffage, what with blast beats and all, but soon shifts into a more atmospheric realm and then alternates between these two extremes smoothly. FRACTAL UNIVERSE are not the first metal rogues to subvert the perceived respectable order of things but they tap into the beauty of stark contrasts so magnificently that you lose all sense of time while listening to this album. I mean, their songs are surprisingly short for progressively tinged efforts, but you can easily be so immersed in these nine new songs that you can suddenly realize you’ve been listening to them for hours. The sense of time may be just an illusion, anyway, but without it, music could not play such a vital role in enchanting us, and these French metal sages sure know how to walk on this temporal tightrope like a ballerina, mesmerizing us.
The progressive quirks on the new album do resonate rather strongly with the air of HAKEN, most prominently in the uptempo, stop-and-go riffs of “Dissecting the Real” and the title track. The latter not only slaps with its riffs; it boasts probably the most spirited solos on the album, by both guitar and saxophone. I’m not entirely sure which one of the band’s two guitarists is responsible for the solo. My guess would be Yohan Dully since Vince Wilquin also takes care of vocals and sax. All the same, the guitar solo in this banger echoes Guthrie Govan nicely – despite featuring lots of funny little notes, the solo conveys genuine emotions. The sax work is no less haunting.
Another noteworthy thing on the album is the magical contrast between all those atmospheric, almost ethereal sections and the brutal riffages. The BREAKING ORBIT-like progger, “Causality’s Grip,” is one of the best examples. Then, in “The Equation of Abundance” the free-floating atmospherics of the verses are adorned with both whispery and throaty vocals, bordering on an almost post-metal-esque aesthetic. Therein lies the band’s ultimate strength – in their knack for marrying heaven with hell and vice versa. The latter also has a nice, quintuple swing which further factors in on the feeling of weightlessness in the song’s floaty verses. The standout track, in this respect, is “Specific Obsolescence,” though. The song blends RIVERS OF NIHIL-like brutality with the clockwork prog riffs of HAKEN in nothing short of a beautiful manner – and, then, halfway into the song, a haunting, ambient saxophone solo leads us to the atmospheric section and another spirited guitar solo.
The biggest mind-bender is the song, “Concealed,” with its jazzy polyrhythms that, while implementing math beyond high-school algebra, sound groovy as hell! To my untrained ear, it sounds as if the band is messing around with a syncopated 9/8 riff juxtaposed against a triplet meter, but I guess I would have to break a few pencils against the tabletop to figure that out properly. What is more important is the way FRACTAL UNIVERSE plunges headfirst into a dark, haunted jazz space à la Tigran Hamasyan and makes it sound so damn cool!
With each new spin, it feels as if each track stands out when I get more familiar with it. However, on repeated listens, “The Seed of Singularity” is slowly becoming THE track on the album. There is something very Ihsahn-like in the song, again. I guess it stems from the marriage of blast beats, haunting atmospherics, and soaring solos – with FRACTAL UNIVERSE‘s unique, French spin on top. That said, the closer is almost like a reprise of this tried-and-true method, harkening back to the album’s opener as though beginning a new cycle as its title suggests. Maybe that is to blame for the effect the album has – losing the sense of time – because the songs form a time loop of sorts, a trajectory of time resembling the snake that eats its tail.
I guess the stars must have been aligned just right around April and May; first, it seemed almost as though this year was going to be pretty bland in terms of progressively leaning death-metal offerings. Then, in a jiffy, we got highly explosive new albums from KARDASHEV, RIVERS OF NIHIL, FALLUJAH, and FRACTAL UNIVERSE. That’s some Mercury retrograde shit right there. While these French metal rogues might not even have yet unlocked all their superpowers, “The Great Filters” is, summa cum laude, an all-around haunting and immensely magical amalgamation of brutal tech-death riffs and atmospheric prog – with lots of cool saxophone adornments to boot!
Written by Jani Lehtinen
Tracklist
- The Void Above
- The Great Filter
- Causality’s Grip
- The Seed of Singularity
- The Equation of Abundance
- Specific Obsolescence
- Dissecting the Real
- Concealed
- A New Cycle
Lineup
Vince Wilquin – vocals, guitars, saxophone
Valentin Pelletier – bass
Clement Denys – drums
Yohan Dully – guitars
Label
M-Theory Audio
Links
https://www.fractaluniverseband.com
