From Entombed to Refused to In Flames, Sweden has given heavy music a great deal to be thankful for. Following that line of greats (and many more), Sweden now gives us I Am Hunger. If you like to move to your metal, if you like to headbang to your metal, if you like to mosh to your metal then I Am Hunger is making music you should listen to.
I Am Hunger’s debut album, Odium, is just pure unbridled metal. If you like your metal raw and unrefined, then this is a band you need to check out. Taking cues from Goes Cube, Bring Me The Horizon, and Amen, I Am Hunger combines enough bile and anger in just under forty minutes to keep listeners sustained for days.
“Somnambulate” hits like a battering ram with a flurry of riffs and screams interspersed with mad solo’s and drums that belt away like a pile driver. The fury continues with “Vultures” which adds some great thrash shredding and some clean vocals which don’t last too long until the headbanging begins again. “Vultures” then veers off the deep end into some quiet, melodic territory foreshadowing the depth to come on the rest of Odium.
Seven tracks in and listeners get to “Distracted” which is the first song to last more than three minutes and is also the first place you really get a sense of the vocal range of Fredrik Forsberg especially when you hit the two and a half minute mark and beyond. Musically, the song just rips. Of course, “Arms Tied” comes up next and just slays all in terms of brutality. Where “Distracted” was four minutes of musical diversity and evolution, “Arms Tied” is a devolution of visceral intensity. Both songs are perfect examples of what makes I Am Hunger such a great band.
Other highlights include the riff-fueled “A Limitation Of Infinity” and the slower “Raised To Hate” which makes a Robin Williams quote from Good Will Hunting sound downright evil.
You can get I Am Hunger’s Odium right here, right now.
Grade: B+