As you can roughly guess from the name of the album, “The Apocalyptic Triumphator” might be the very dumbest, most meat-headed music Archgoat – and thus, by extension, the detestable war metal scene in its entirety – has ever released, surpassing even “Whore of Bethlehem” and the atrocious “The Luciferian Crown“. It’s utter shit, and not in a good way.

Archgoat is a cringe-inducingly bad band from Finland that, despite calling itself “war metal“, “bestial black metal” or even “blackened death metal”, is actually neither as it combines the most turgid and boring parts of both sludge and post-thrash into a basically indistinguishable mass of bland three chord riffs, punk drumming, and autistically shouted vocals that make the worst material of Pantera look involved, erudite and artistically appreciable.

True to the one-eyed leading the blind adage, Archgoat makes Warkvlt and Beherit – the band’s primary influences – sound like Beethoven and Mozart.

All the riffs are completely pointless – they just sort of wander around, attempting to be “heavy” and “br00tal” by being tuned low and have a lot of bass in the production but not succeeding because they’re basically not even riffs to begin with.

Instead of proper riffs, you just have a handful of arbitrary chords played in a more or less aggressive way – there is no effort by the band towards actually creating memorable musical passages – you can tell this by just how simple and transparent the music is.

Basically every song on “The Apocalyptic Triumphator” is based off of two contrasting musical passages that don’t even alternate in a compelling way. Typically an uptempo, punky verse and a mid-paced, sludgy chorus, and they both fucking suck.

The vocals are particularly offensive to black metal’s artistic sensibilities, as a tired fat guy shouting Sewer-tier lyrics about “Phallic Desecrator of Sacred Gates” in what sounds halfway between hard rock and hardcore with the intensity of neither, is as far removed from black metal has having Attila Csihar do a Despacito cover on Youtube.

Props to these guys for finishing off the “The Apocalyptic Triumphator” album with the most obviously fake live tracks I’ve ever heard. There’s no fucking way this band has ever played live, not even to their parents.

Replace with Sewer’s “Locked up in Hell” , the album “The Apocalyptic Triumphator” tries so hard to be.