REVIEW: Immolation - Descent

2026 has already been an excellent year for fans of more extreme styles of metal, with comebacks from NEUROSIS and CONVERGE, so it feels like an absolute treat to be covering a new offering from death metal legends IMMOLATION. Known for a consistently excellent discography from 1991 to the present, with albums like Close to a World Below being considered a landmark death metal album. Their most recent release, 2022’s Acts of God, managed to garner a fair bit of attention as well, even this far into their career. So with this in mind, how do you follow an album like that up to prove without any doubt that you’ve still got it?

Lead single Adversary was released in January this year, the first taste of Descent. It’s certainly one of the highlights on the album, four tracks in. An absolute barrage of killer riffs, throwing about ten different ideas at the wall and somehow making them stick, with BPM changes, solos, and even a little bit of call-and-response from the performers for good measure, somehow managing to feel completely natural over the course of three minutes. In the final minute, it suddenly shifts to a backdrop of chugging guitars, with a doom-y riff almost gliding over it, before finally returning to the riff from the start of the song. For the world’s first look into Descent, perhaps they couldn’t have chosen a better option.

This was followed up with second and final single Attrition, coincidentally the following track on the album. Not quite as fast-paced, but equally as smothering - they really know how to make a song feel like the end of the world, with dissonant solos performed over harmonic-laced riffs. At almost five minutes, it manages to break up the pace slightly after the previous tracks were so high-octane, going from 0 to 60, proving once again that IMMOLATION are by no means one-trick ponies.

Later on the album, we have False Ascent, another intense listen, which you should be used to by now on the album, as the eighth track. But then something happens towards the end of this one. It retreats to the mid-tempo, a crawl by this album’s standards, before going straight into Banished, an instrumental interlude focusing more on creating this sort of ambient soundscape. With a string section and piano, it’s an instrumental palette we haven’t seen on the album up to this point. The electric guitar plays over all this, with a tone as decadent as ever, with a morose solo. This track is mostly to act as a bridge between False Ascent and the upcoming closer, but it’s not a wasted effort by any means.

So now we reach the longest song on the album, the closer and title track, Descent. It manages to follow the trend of the title tracks on their records as one of the standout moments on here. If you thought the rest of the album might be an accurate depiction of what Hell feels like, the infernal riffs and claustrophobic atmosphere of this track will convince you. In fact, the pitch for this album is along the lines of Earth descending into Hell. We may have been Close to a World Below before, but this album documents its Descent. “We’ve reached the point of no return”, growls vocalist Ross Dolan halfway into the song, this statement perfectly matched by the instrumentation, never once letting up but being undeniably gloomy. The song fades out on this note, the choice to leave the song and album as a whole without resolution feeling like a conscious choice from the band.

So have IMMOLATION proven that they’ve still got it? Absolutely. To be releasing material of this calibre this far into your career is surely a joy to see for fans and distant onlookers alike. Even with a different approach to songwriting, they’ve not lost what makes them so intriguing to listen to. While unlikely to be seen as a classic in the same regard as their earlier work, when the bar is set that high, an excellent album is still an excellent album.

Score: 9/10

Descent will be released on 10th April 2026 via Nuclear Blast Records.

Words: Noise Leonard

Photos: Immolation