Throughout its four decades of existence, black metal has had a tense relationship with technology. The genre’s principal obsessions have always been the world, the flesh, and the devil—a medieval ideology to match its medieval aesthetics, with little apparent interest in the trappings of modernity. A typical black metal photo shoot features a band standing deep in the forest, miles from the decadence of civilization. Even the production quality of much of the genre’s foundational work seems to suggest a suspicion of machines; in black metal doctrine, a ragged, hissing four-track recording is more richly prized than a cleanly articulated mix.
By rejecting that technophobic lineage, the digitized assault of Denver’s Lykotonon isn’t just refreshing—it’s transgressive. On their debut album, Promethean Pathology, they splice the instinctual atavism of black metal with cold industrial rhythms and pulsing electronics. There’s precedent for this blend of genres, most notably on the self-titled Thorns album from 2001. That project, led by onetime Mayhem guitarist Snorre Ruch, transformed second-wave black metal into something you might hear at 4 a.m. in a goth club. In the early ’90s, Ruch was as committed to the insular Norwegian scene as anybody, but by the new millennium he had developed an interest in electronic instrumentation and an ear for the dance floor.
Lykotonon push the sound Ruch pioneered on Thorns even further from black metal’s core, letting their industrial and electronic impulses take over entire songs. The glitchy, wobbling “Apeiron” is ostensibly an interlude, wedged between the crushing “Wrested From Solace” and “Psychosocratic,” but the sheer seismic weight it throws around in its scant two minutes helps it transcend that status. Two tracks later, “The Primal Principle” emerges from a cloud of woozy electronics to deliver a kind of industrial black metal highlight reel: robotic vocoder, skittering percussion, mechanized guitar riffing, a distorted Altered States sample, and other assorted bleeps and bloops.
Elsewhere on the album, Lykotonon let their more traditional black metal side reign. “The Apocryphal Self” is a fiery epic with towering, melodic riffs, while “That Which Stares in Kind” builds to a lightless climax of blasting drums and depraved, howling vocals. Both songs offer plenty of synths and samples, but they play a supporting role whenever flesh-and-blood terror takes center stage. Too often, bands who look outside this genre to augment their sound write black metal songs and then tack on the foreign elements like Halloween-store cobwebs. Whether they’re the main event or a cannily deployed counterpoint, the industrial and electronic components on Promethean Pathology always feel thoroughly incorporated.
The musicians in Lykotonon perform pseudonymously, but they’ve confirmed that they share members with fellow Colorado heavy hitters Wayfarer, Stormkeep, and Blood Incantation. The Blood Incantation connection makes immediate sense, especially considering their recent analog synth-based ambient release, Timewave Zero. The erstwhile death metallers are no strangers to the vast worlds of sound and texture that become available to a heavy band when they engage with the broader world of electronic music. Lykotonon have picked up the torch and used it to light a path into the digital beyond.
