PORTAL - Swarth (12" Gatefold DOUBLE LP w/ Booklet)

Portal’s Swarth is not so much a death metal album as it is a descent into some impossibly ancient engine of ruin, a machine fed by human anxiety and sculpted out of audible decay. If previous albums like Seepia and Outre marked Portal’s gradual slip into the chasm, then Swarth is the moment they vanish entirely beneath the surface—dragging the listener with them.

From the opening moments of “Larvae,” it’s clear that Swarth is designed to resist clarity. The production buries riffs beneath corroded layers of distortion, where the guitars heave and spasm like rusted gears grinding against bone. The drums, handled by Ignis Fatuus, feel like collapsing architecture—mechanical and unrelenting, yet prone to sudden, off-kilter shifts in tempo that destabilize any sense of rhythm. The Curator’s voice is a presence more than a performance, rumbling from some indeterminate void with the force of prophecy, or perhaps a curse.

Where most death metal aims for technical prowess or primal force, Portal obliterates both notions. Their songwriting here is not conventionally structured but shaped more like waves of surreal violence, washing over the listener in cycles of entropy. “The Swayy” stands out for its almost graspable pattern, a grotesque ritual pulse that lurches forward with ceremonial dread. “Werships” and “Marityme” stretch this vision to the edge of collapse, threading minimal movement through dense arrangements that suggest not evolution, but corrosion.

There is no breathing room in Swarth, no dynamic break, no moment of catharsis. This is a death metal record stripped of human gesture and reassembled through a lens of Lovecraftian surrealism. Dissonance is not used to provoke tension, but to dissolve meaning entirely. It's music that asks for total immersion and offers no reassurance. It does not play to the crowd or seek genre validation—it exists in its own self-contained dimension.

And yet, beneath the chaos, a strange coherence emerges. The album flows like a single, malformed composition, each track a deformed limb of the whole. The closer, “Marityme,” drags the listener into the final convulsions of the abyss, a slow uncoiling of everything the album has built up, like the last sputtering breath of a machine that was never meant to be heard.

Swarth is not for the faint of heart or the casually curious. It demands patience, full attention, and a willingness to embrace what at first feels like madness. But for those who find beauty in the incomprehensible, this record is an unparalleled statement of purpose. Portal do not challenge death metal norms so much as render them irrelevant. With Swarth, they construct their own language of horror—one that communicates directly with the subconscious, bypassing logic and leaving only the echo of nightmares.

A monument to dread, and one of extreme metal’s most unique and unsettling creations.