MESHUGGAH Koloss (2012) CD

There is a moment on Koloss where the riff is so heavy it stops feeling like music and starts feeling like geology. Meshuggah had been threatening to write this record for years, and in 2012 they finally delivered it, an album that moves at the speed of tectonic plates and hits with comparable force.

Where some of the Gothenburg crew were softening edges, Meshuggah went the other direction entirely. Koloss is slower than much of their catalogue, which makes it more terrifying, not less. The polyrhythmic architecture is still labyrinthine, Tomas Haake's drumming still sounds like a machine that has achieved consciousness and deeply regrets it, but there's a lumbering, almost doom-adjacent quality to tracks like I Am Colossus and The Demon's Name Is Surveillance that gets under your skin in ways Destroy Erase Improve never quite did. This is djent before djent became a genre populated by teenagers with eight-strings and no ideas. The real thing, from the source.

CD format. Full-length studio album, originally released on Nuclear Blast. Swedish pressing. Running time approximately 53 minutes across nine tracks.

Fans of: Gojira, Strapping Young Lad, Decapitated, SikTh, Pantera