Release Date September 4th, 2026
Format Digital
Genre Death Metal
Origin U.S.
Fog Wall is a two man band from Reno, Nevada, formed by lifelong friends Zak Brady and Alex Malmquist, who share the vocals. Malmquist plays bass, wrote all the music and did the engineering, mixing and mastering himself. Brady drew the cover art. The name comes from the FromSoftware games, the grey barrier every player walks through before a boss fight, which tells you where their heads are. They're into dark fantasy, horror and the grimmest corners of Tolkien. For the album they brought in drummer Logan Griggs, Loretta Hewitt on synths and a guitarist called Shagrat "Quincy" Gorbag. That name is stitched together from the two orc captains who fight over Frodo's mithril coat in the tower of Cirith Ungol. "Gloomweaver" is their debut album.
"Gloomweaver" runs ten tracks and about three quarters of an hour. The riffs come from the Morbid Angel and Deicide school, churning tremolo lines and twisted, evil chord shapes, broken up by breakdowns straight out of The Acacia Strain playbook and built for the pit. Malmquist mixed his own bass fat and upfront, so the low end grinds under every riff and swallows the guitars when "Belching Black Vapours" sinks into its closing stretch. That makes for a heavy, menacing sound, and it comes at a price. Griggs pounds away with a heavy right foot, his blasts on "Knife, Sting, Tooth" hold steady, and the midtempo stomp of "The Accursed" swings.
The two vocalists trade low growls and higher shrieks in the vein of The Black Dahlia Murder, and in "Mazarbul (Desolation)" that back and forth turns the Chamber of Mazarbul into a proper tomb. The lyrics dig into Shelob's lair, Moria, a spider demon bent on devouring the world and humans sealed inside glass jars. It's dark fantasy lore written with a straight face and zero irony. Around the middle, "Strangling Gloom" and "Fleshpot Ritual" drop into the same breakdown formula back to back, and the trick wears thin.
“Frantic Orb Wielder" rips through in under three minutes and wakes the album up. The Type O Negative cover is the curveball. "The Profit Of Doom" runs over ten minutes on "Dead Again", and here it's cut down to a medley of under six, with Hewitt's synths laying a cold Brooklyn gothic haze over the death metal treatment. Placed ninth, it breaks the flow before "Traverse" closes the album. This is a grim, heavy debut from two friends raised on Tolkien, Dark Souls and death metal, one mix revision away from real beast status.
|8.0
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