It feels like Orbit Culture blew up out of absolutely no-where: though the band first saw success with 2020’s ‘Nija,’ it feels like their notoriety has increased tenfold over the past year or so. The four-piece are a rising stock, with new album ‘Death Above Life’ coming at the perfect time to soundtrack their 2026 festival run. The record will surely go over extremely well at the likes of Rockstadt and Summer Breeze, where its bulldozing riffs can really be let loose— if anything, the band’s ambitions feel much too cramped in the studio.

Like so many other groups in the modern metal scene, Orbit Culture are victims of the loudness war: if your average album sounds like a polite conversation, ‘Death Above Life’ is yodelling in your face. Whenever the record aims to bury you under wave after wave of dissonance and abrasion, it has an unfortunate habit of smothering its own songs. Take single ‘Bloodhound,’ which is so overstuffed with deafening double kick and towering walls of guitar as to transform into a whirlwind of indecipherable gibberish— aside from the constant, almost laughable use of the word “f*ck,” very little about the track actually gets through to you. Many other promising moments across the album are swallowed up by this ‘more is more’ approach to arrangement: when it reaches its climax, opener ‘Inferna’ becomes a messy collection of garish synth blasts and muddy guitar riffs, with the song itself hidden far in the background.

The greatest thing standing in the way of ‘Death Above Life’ is its own sound: too often, the record leaves us begging the band to tone things down, just a smidge. Compared to his bestial growls, the clean singing that Niklas Karlsson throws in across the record leaves a hell of a lot to be desired: on a cut like ‘Inside the Waves,’ his vocals begin to resemble a distorted take on Billy Corgan’s much-maligned nasal tone. As you can imagine, it’s not pretty, especially when laid bare on closing ballad ‘The Path I Walk.’ Between the aggressive layering that every vocal part is forced into and the unreasonable heft allowed to the guitars and drums (especially the drums, which have a nasty habit of choking the sound stage), ‘Death Above Life’ winds up feeling much too loud for its own good— tracks like ‘Nerve’ and ‘The Storm’ are absolutely exhausting, in a way we doubt the band were aiming for.

It’s when we look past those glaring issues that Orbit Culture’s newest release proves itself to be a rabid dog, able to rip your face off at a moment’s notice: even despite their lacklustre presentation, a number of cuts across the record will still have you reaching for the nearest bible. ‘Death Above Life’ is at its best when the band take a caveman-like approach to riff writing: the sheer weight of ‘Hydra’ is truly diabolical, marching forward with no regard for the listener’s safety. The title track displays a similar level of animalistic brutality— though the clean vocals that make up the choruses of both can feel quite out of place, they do little to distract from just how hard these song will get you headbanging. It’s for this reason that most of Orbit Culture’s newest material will probably go over better in the live setting than it does in the studio: the singular focus on heaviness is the defining element that both saves and cripples ‘Death Above Life.’

Elsewhere, the record is a scattered collection of promising ideas and uneven execution. ‘The Tales of War’ opens on some pummelling riffs guaranteed to get your blood pumping, but then proceeds to lose a significant amount of momentum as more and more vocal layers and atmospheric qualities begin to stack on top of one another. Melody is not Orbit Culture’s greatest strength: just look again at ‘The Path I Walk.’ ‘Death Above Life’ follows the classic metalcore formula of nine heavy tracks and a ballad— that ballad, underwritten and overblown as it is, is little more than the record’s bad aftertaste. There would be a lot to love about the blistering drumming and grand ambitions of ‘The Storm’ and ‘Neural Collapse’ in another context: it’s in the execution that these songs fall short. At the height of their success, Karlsson and company have pushed things much too far, leaving their newest album to suffer for it.

If you want to bang your head and lose yourself in a raging circle pit, Orbit Culture’s newest work is everything you could ever need: listen to it through headphones, though, and the magic is lost. ‘Death Above Life’ struggles to escape its own deafening volume, heaping melodic vocals onto a series of muddled and muffled arrangements. The band are certainly promising, and deserve all the success they’ve been reaping— we can only hope that, in amongst the festival fun, they learn some restraint.