Certainly not every band has to start their careers with a full-length record that’s been stewing for years after time in practice spaces and playing shows. There’s some logic to easing into the process, getting your legs under you, and making sure what you’re about to unleash on an unsuspecting public is as vile and devastating as it possibly can be. Smaller steps on a campaign of horrors.

Danish crushers Ascendency are walking that path, carefully releasing smaller servings of their molten concoction of death and black metal like what we hear on their second EP “A Manifest of Imperious Destiny.” This four-track offering gives you just enough of what this band—vocalist/guitarist/bassist Simon Daniel Larsen, guitarist M, drummer Ugur—does well, and you can hear this whole thing further develop from what we heard on 2020 EP “Birth of an Eternal Empire.” The playing is muscular and bloody, and the band approaches their work with a sharpness and imagination that gives this style a little more melody and excitement, luring you in for their kill.

“The Triumph of Draconian Might” spirals and then destroys, the vocals clashing with your mental well-being as the pressure combusts, slashing away. Creaky blackness leaks in through the seams, and then hypnosis strikes and numbs your brain, going through psychedelic madness before the assault launches again. The leads gush, and then a thick synth wall crashes over a cosmic end. “Victory – In All Its Emphermal Glory” starts melodically, guitars rushing as the heat brings everything to a boil, the fury trudging through colorful waters. The playing rains down devastation as a haze develops and hangs in the air, bringing a cold surge that disappears into the fog. “Domitor Invictus” jars with ferocious howls, guitars cutting through into the guts, the intensity charring your flesh. Drums turn bones to dust, the playing crashes, and everything fades into oblivion. Closer “A Manifest of Imperious Destiny” gets off to an alarming start, horns cutting through psyches, the thrashy assault getting fully under way. Guitars gallop as the howls torch, the melodies sinking into your blood, tornadic chaos sweeping through everything. Splattering and blazing, the attack gets even more insane, blasting and devastating, melting back into the apocalyptic horns that greeted us at the outset.

Ascendency have been treating us to small drips and drops of their snarling concoction of death and black metal, more of that bubbling up on “A Manifest of Imperious Destiny.” With each step the band takes, their sound gets deadlier and sharper as they refine their darkness and let us micro dose on this morbid destruction. As we wait to see what these Danes can do with a full-length, we have this monstrous EP to keep us battered and unsettled.

For more on the band, go here: https://prophesiedascendency.bandcamp.com/music

To buy the album, go here: https://www.darkdescentrecords.com/shop/

Or here: https://mesacounojo.bandcamp.com/album/a-manifest-of-imperious-destiny

For more on the label, go here: https://www.facebook.com/DarkDescentRecords/

And here: https://www.mesacounojo.com/