Review: Tribal Gaze – The Nine Choircs
From its first moments, “The Nine Choirs” makes a promise: you are entering a world of weight, groove, and unapologetic brutality. Tribal Gaze out of Texas seem less concerned with subtlety and more with making your ribcage feel every hammer blow. This is death metal built for destruction, with enough hardcore-tinged edge that the listener often feels caught between rage and adrenaline rather than just beaten down.
“Cold Devotion” kicks the album off with ominous samples, then drops you into thick riffs that are almost suffocating in their low-end power. The guitars trade between crushing chugs and more melodic lines, while the vocals weave between hardcore shouts, roars, and gutturals that are drenched in reverb and ferocity. There are moments of lightning speed in the drum work, but more often it’s mid-paced, groovy death metal with beatdowns that smack you when you least expect them. Songs like “With This Creature I Return” and “As A Thousand Voices Sing” balance that pace versus intensity interplay well, giving space for the brutal parts to hit harder.
Production supports the chaos well. The guitars are thick without becoming a fog, the bass underlies the riffing with just enough grime, and drums feel powerful: the snare cracks, the fill-work is satisfying, and even in dense passages things don’t collapse into a single muddy wall. But there are times where the mix leaves the vocals slightly submerged, where some blast beats feel reactive rather than integral. Sometimes riffs repeat without enough variation, and there are opportunities for more hooks or memorable leads that the band almost reach but then abandon in favor of sheer heaviness.
Lyrically and thematically, the album leans into anti-religious imagery, mythic questioning, and visceral humiliation of false idols. That helps the music feel like more than just pummelling; it gives purpose and a throbbing undercurrent of anger and disgust that works well. The closing song, “Worthless Offering”, ends things not with resolution but with echoes: a sense you’ve been dragged through darkness and left there with your thoughts. The brutality and groove are consistent enough, but after a times of mid-paced heaviness some songs tend to blur together , when the band could benefit from more contrast, more dynamic surprises. But those are missteps in a record that mostly delivers what it promises: bone-crushing riffs, moments of groove, and more heaviness than many debut albums manage.
In conclusion “The Nine Choirs” is a powerful debut, not perfect but confidently ruthless. For fans of old school death metal mixed with hardcore bite, this hits hard and lasts in the ears. If Tribal Gaze sharpen their variety and memorable moments next time, they could be a staple in this brutal new wave.
