PORTAL - Ion (12" Gatefold LP w/ Poster)

With Ion, Portal dismantle expectations and reforge their craft into something scalpel-sharp, brilliantly fractured, and unsettlingly lucid. Gone is the murky density that cloaked earlier records like Outre’ and Vexovoid in a fog of dread. In its place is a flayed and glaring intensity, where every jagged tremolo and frenzied drum pattern feels exposed under a clinical, unblinking light. The result is a death metal record that trades suffocation for incision—cutting with precision rather than crushing with weight.

From the opening sparks of “ESP Ion Age,” Portal announce this transformation with a blitz of angular riffs and almost mechanical violence. The clarity of production allows the band’s notoriously frenetic playing to surface in full—each guitar line twisted like broken circuitry, each rhythmic shift executed with machine-like calculation. Horror Illogium’s guitar work is a maze of reversed logic and dissonant geometries, while The Curator’s breathless vocal delivery slithers between whispered incantation and subterranean roar, never dominating the mix but always haunting it.

What sets Ion apart is its ability to maintain this feverish pace without collapsing into repetition or fatigue. “Phathom” and “Phreqs” stand out not only for their mind-warping technicality, but for the eerie semblance of structure beneath the chaos. Riffs coil and unwind like corrupted DNA, while drums spiral in convulsive patterns that feel both improvisational and meticulously mapped. Even the ambient detours—“Spores” and the closing minutes of “Olde Guarde”—serve as essential moments of decompression, allowing the listener to briefly surface before being dragged back under.

The absence of a credited bassist only adds to the record’s alien feel. It creates a hollow space in the frequency range, amplifying the shrillness of the guitars and the sharp snap of the snare. The overall mix feels weightless yet volatile, as if the songs are being beamed in from some quantum void rather than played by human hands.

Ion is not simply another Portal record. It is a deliberate mutation—a cleansing fire that burns away the murk to reveal the band’s core: erratic, angular, and utterly committed to the art of sonic disfigurement. It is less a death metal album than a transmission from a collapsing dimension, encoded in frequencies that sear the brain and contort the soul.

In this unrelenting, labyrinthine landscape, Portal have never sounded more alive.