Well and truly, we live in a day and age where anything seems to be possible in the world of metal music. From acts holding strong to the original foundations of whatever given style to ensure the old ways never die to those pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, we’ve seen a clear and indisputable rise of the latter in the past decade to the point where it sometimes feels you can’t go two feet with another act popping up to catch the interest of many. By every stretch of imagination, Stortregn is absolutely one of those acts with their reputation and already high-level talent only growing with time. That tends to be the case when you’ve been around for several years and after five albums that really assert your dominance, but that doesn’t make their power any less potent with their sixth album a nigh-on perfect example to that.

It’s barely been two years since we last saw new material from Stortregn, but they’ve never been ones to sit around for long with the pandemic surely giving them plenty of time to write new music and then use the following years to refine that. I thought we saw them at their peak with 2021’s “Impermanence” seeing that concept done gloriously, but it’s with everything that’s been brought to the table for “Finitude” that the preceding album is truly given a run for its money. For the entirety of these eight tracks, Stortregn does a spectacular job at utterly eviscerating anything and everything in its path with a magnificent display of technicality and overwhelming power that only pauses at the most opportune moments so that you can really bask in the contrast that is Stortregn’s dense yet immensely diverse sound that is always something to be admired. “Finitude” shows us time and again that Stortregn still very much deserves to be hailed as one of the leading acts in all of technical death metal even given the stiff competition of late with the riffs, the crazy passages of mind-bending instrumentation, and furious intensities ensuring that the whole of the record is far more than a loud demonstration of wanting to sound more complicated than what’s reality. Instead, it is at every turn throughout “Finitude” that Stortregn crushes, astonished, bewilders, and enchants the listener to the point that one is left rooted in place as their flesh is peeled right off their bones by the end of this gorgeous and blistering performance.

What we’re given here is a testament to the long-standing power of this Swiss act as well as a clear high-mark for the year’s technical death metal catalog which is always the case whenever Stortregn comes about, coincidentally. Even if you find yourself somehow unsatisfied with what “Impermanence” brought to the table, I can almost guarantee that “Finitude” will scratch whatever itch you may have. This record damn near has it all, and demands to be hailed as such.

LISTEN to “Finitude” on Bandcamp here.

LIKE Stortregn on Facebook here.