Aural Aggravation

Testimony Records – 16th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Four albums in twenty years isn’t a particularly impressive work-rate, but I’m assuming that liker the majority of bands, the members of Total Annihilation have not only day jobs, but families and all of the stuff that adults tend to. The fact that they’ve managed to continue making music – and earned themselves both a fanbase and level of reputation – is no small feat, and is a testament to their commitment to making music. This seems to be where a lot of people lose their way in life, and end up feeling bitter and unfulfilled, accepting the process of succumbing to the drudgery of capitalist structures, and becoming increasingly resentful of the way that parenting and domesticity take over. These guys clearly have no shortage of rage, but it’s not over how their lives have turned out, and of course, they have an outlet – a substantial outlet driven by heavy guitars and pounding hell-for-leather percussion… a healthy outlet. It’s an observation I’ve made before that metal gigs are some of the friendliest, least threatening, environments I’ve experienced, and the more extreme the metal, the nicer the folks. There are always exceptions, as the 90s Norwegian black metal scene evidenced, but by and large… extreme metal channels those difficult emotions, the anger, the rage, the hatred.

Mountains of Madness promises ‘all the Swiss precision and trademark elements their following has come to expect of them but also with more of everything: more tempo and serious speed, more brutality, more power, more thrash, more death but also more harmonies, more melodies, and more musicality!’

I’m not entirely sure that what we want from a death metal album is ‘more harmonies, more melodies, and more musicality’: me, I want more grunt, more grind, more attack, more brutality. May be I just like punishment, maybe I just want music that bludgeons and batters, maybe I seek catharsis through sonic violence.

The blurbage also informs us ‘There are also more tentacles, more jaws, more razor-sharp teeth, more twisted mutation, and definitely more evil! Talking about tentacles, the album title points already towards the famous cosmic horror novella At the Mountains of Madness (1936) by American gothic author H. P. Lovecraft, who has been a constant source of inspiration for the metal scene in general and TOTAL ANNIHILATION in particular…

Yet for Total Annihilation all this horror is not just escapism for entertainment but it serves a meaningful purpose. The album is permeated by a deep moral disgust and burning anger towards all the evil and reckless destruction that humanity forces onto itself and all other forms of life on this planet and earth itself. Mountains of Madness is conceived as an echo of and a bold manifesto about the state of the world as well as an artistic sign of our time.’

And there it is: it’s hard to argue, if you have any sense if the current state of the world, that we’re fucked. The question at this point seems to be less ‘will humans become extinct?’ and more ‘will we become extinct through war or climate change?’

‘The Art of Torture’ brings the rage in frenzied blast of beats, riffery, and raw-throated vocals. there is, of course, the obligatory monster solo which occupies the majority of the second half of the song, but the title track brings an instant shift. Yes, it’s very much driven by dingy guitars and pulverising drumming, but it snarls into the abyss and is gnarly and heavy, and while there are some bursts of obligatory fretwankery which feel very much template-driven, it brings the weight – before ‘Chokehold’ grinds in hard, overloading volume and thick distortion paired with rapidfire double-pedal drumming and some wild harmonic guitar soloing.

Mountains of Madness hits hard. Across the eleven tracks, Total Annihilation bring riffs galore, and while there is melody in the lead guitar parts, it’s hardly tuneful in the conventional sense. The sound is solid, the bass and guitar both chunky, the drums blasting, and the pace and rabidity seem to increase as the album progresses.

AA