Byzantine - American metal from West Virginia

Byzantine

Harbingers

Metal Blade Records

13 June 2025

This album convinced me! I was not expecting anything in particular, actually. The truth is that I do not know this band's music and I had never heard their albums. Therefore, I did not really expect-want a certain sound from them. It was like a surprise, "Let's see what this is all about." Plus, I didn't even know if their name, a word for the Eastern Roman Empire, would have anything to do with the music. After having listened to the album, I think their name is simply a band name, not a statement of lyrical focus. I did not have access to the lyrics for album.

It would be fake to write pretending that I know the band's music, discography or history, so let's get to the facts of what actually happened when listening to this album. Man, it sounded very American, very American metal! I would say it is a bit of concoction of 33% Southern/Louisiana/Texas metal grooves, 33% thrash-adjacent, and 33% late 90s heaviness-emotional vibes/metalcore foundations.

The genre doesn't matter, though. The songs only took a few listens before I felt like I understood the general sound of the band. Some of the songs do, in fact, sound like a contemporary (not retro, not 80s) thrash: chunky, hard-driving, marching-forward riffing, headbanging rhythms, with some aggro-metal screaming and some melodic singing. At other times, the groove metal feeling channels the ready-for-a-war-of-words attitude of in-your-face level of confidence-attitude with the band throwing down as hard as they can and throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the listener, and it works.

This review is actually not very good at communicating how listenable and enjoyable the songs are. Fans of American post-1990 metal will find a lot of those sounds coming together but done by grown men: groove metal and metalcore done with a lot more knowledge from when the band began back in the year 2000.

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