Metal has developed its own visual language in the last 50 years, and it’s only grown more extreme and diabolical over time: where Black Sabbath were happy to use a pig costume for the cover of ‘Paranoid,’ their disciplines have slowly grown attached to the macabre. Frozen Soul have never been a band to shy away from this aesthetic, as the covers of 2021’s ‘Crypt Of Ice’ and 2023’s ‘Glacial Domination’ show, but they’ve always preferred frigid tundras to blazing hellscapes. If new record ‘No Place of Warmth’ stands out for any reason, it’s for the icy cold that runs through this brutal exhibition.

Frozen Soul may be making death metal like you’ve always known it, but their newest project is unmistakably modern— it was produced by Josh Schroeder (a previous collaborator with Lorna Shore), and you can feel his fingerprints all over every bass drop and thudding guitar riff on display. For the most part, ‘No Place of Warmth’ is an exceedingly simple album as far as songwriting is concerned, proudly wearing its Bolt Thrower influence on its sleeve as it piles breakdowns and caveman death metal barrages on top of you. ‘Absolute Zero’ fails to crack the one-minute, breaking your neck with startling efficiency, but even the longest tracks here are interested in naught but ripping your face off. The driving double kick and lumbering guitar parts that make up a cut like ‘Chaos Will Reign’ or ‘Dreadnaught’ aren’t so far removed from what you might find on any number of death metal classics: what sets Frozen Soul apart is their commitment to using all the tools at their disposal to demolish your eardrums, right up until they blow out your speakers.

Schroeder is known for his massive soundstages, and he clearly hasn’t held back when it came to this record— many of the most memorable moments on ‘No Place of Warmth’ are its devilish bass drops and slamming breakdowns, and to give credit where it’s due, few bands are committing so fully to outright devastation as Frozen Soul are. It’s a style of music that sucks you in at the time, certainly, but even the band themselves seem aware of how exhausting these constant barrages can become, keeping their third album at a trim 35 minutes because of it. For a project this singularly barbaric though, even these eleven songs are a hefty pill to swallow. ‘No Place of Warmth’ marches towards its own demise without hesitation, going to greater and greater lengths to shock and overwhelm you. By the time we reach ‘Skinned by the Wind’ and ‘DEATHWEAVER,’ their bag of tricks is clearly beginning to come up empty— once ‘Frost Forged’ starts peaking your sound system, Frozen Soul betray that their songwriting well has run dry, dialling things back significantly for cheesy closer ‘Killin Time (Until It’s Time to Kill).’

When the band have you gripped in their icy clutches though, you can really feel the chill creeping up your spine: in its best moments, ‘No Place of Warmth’ stands apart from its contemporaries simply for the lengths it goes to to obliterate your expectations. The record’s first leg is loaded with high-profile guest features, all of which settle in surprisingly naturally— where the guttural vocals of Sanguisugabogg’s Devin Swank and Machine Head’s Robb Flynn are natural additions to ‘Dreadnaught’ and ‘Invoke War’ respectively, you can’t exactly say the same for the eery black metal screams that My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way brings to the table. Even without him though, the title track would surely be the standout song of the bunch, delivering a series of ominous lead melodies and doom metal progressions to match the album’s menacing artwork. Outside this opening number, Frozen Soul do nothing less than delivering the goods— we’re not here to argue with the rumbling growls of Chad Green or the grim bass lines of Samantha Mobley.

Frozen Soul have become a somewhat divisive band in their field, and their new record demonstrates why that might be the case: the group make brutish music, even by death metal standards, and you can imagine a handful of genre purists turning their noses up at the record’s modern bells and whistles. Truthfully, the band’s appeal lies almost solely in their vicious brutality, which is second to none— this is one for the masochists out there, if not for the scholars.