It Echoes in the Wild

Hailing from Canada and featuring members of other such underground luminaries as Mitochondrion and Auroch, Egregore are something of a supergroup and It Echoes in the Wild is just their second album in seven years. And their sound, suitably enough, is wild – mixing genres freely yet remaining firmly extreme metal. Black, death, thrash, heavy, all metals are to be found here, and it takes a good few listens to appreciate as at first the effect is quite overwhelming. The band are a trio and each contributes to the vocals with additional guest vocals from Auroch’s Cuillen Sander and Weapon’s Mashruk Huq, resulting in growls, shrieks, whispers, clean singing, (thankfully limited) spoken word, and everything inbetween, and there are times when everything feels sloppy and barely constructed, a chaotic racket that doesn’t just threaten to but completely goes off the rails – Stair into the Vortex an early example.

Add to this the sheer lack of verse/chorus structure and a simply ridiculous amount of riffs, and recommending this becomes a tough job! Stick with it, however, and Egregore’s path of madness becomes saner; indeed, it absolutely entices you. Following the path of the likes of Negative Plane, the band’s influences are distilled into the kind of prog-tinged soup that will please all who taste it. Riff-driven and with a clear ear for a hook, Egregore throw everything into the mix and turn the tempo up as high as it will go for frequent passages of what can only be described as blackened speed metal. When you’ve ‘gotten’ it, this is a more than effective formula, and the highlights come thick and fast. There are clear King Diamond references in the falsetto shrieks and guitar flamboyances in Craven Acts of Desperate Men, for instance, despite the riffing and vocals otherwise leaning far more towards blackened thrash metal, and the seven-minute song has plenty of twists and turns as it goes.

You could really dip into any track present of the ten and find much to dissect, even sub-two-minute opener Cast Adrift managing to fit sharp-edged riffing into its throat-singing, percussion, and echoing ambience introduction to the album. It then seamlessly slides into first track proper Voice on the West Wind, which keeps those creepy whispered vocals as it ploughs through an intense Morbid Angel-meets-early-Slayer-plus-layered-acoustic-strums base with plenty of later widdly lead guitar – simply captivating! From the Yawning Crevass Shrieks a Transmorphic Gale barrels along like early Destruction or Sodom, some subtle synthesizers (courtesy of guest Lillian Liu) later providing a more eerie feel. And even later pieces like the slower, more mournful-feeling Servants of the Second Death have plenty to keep your attention, not to mention the ten-minute closing title track, which starts aggressively before shifting tempos down, throwing everything in from proggy acoustic strums to sorrowful doom with clean ghostly vocals.

Perhaps liking this does come down to purely personal taste – your reviewer loved that last Negative Plane album in 2022 yet it barely seemed to make ripples, and it is far more hipster-friendly with a cleaner sound and more proggy vibes than this! – but black metal transformed without losing its essence or integrity will always appeal to this necronaut, and Egregore more than fit the bill. This is by no means a perfect album; many listens later there’s still pieces like Stair into the Vortex that are simply inferior to the best songs here, and taking this song by song means that the flaws will show up more clearly. As a whole, as an album and an experience, however, It Echoes in the Wind is tremendous, an excellently-written and performed piece of extreme metal that comes highly recommended and with time and even greater familiarity seems a sure-fire contender for the best of 2026 already!