Ancestral Legacy is a genre-crossing band from Norway, primarily blending doom and goth into one sublime mix and features beautiful clean female vocals coupled up with powerful harsh male vocals. Terminal is the band’s latest offering, and put simply – it’s an absolute excellent listen.
There’s gentle atmospheric melodic moments, and crushingly heavy moments, and when blended together, it just works. A particularly good example of this is during the opening track Bone Code, which is also one of the strongest tracks of the album. It begins with a fairly sparse piano line accompanied by sweetly-sung female vocals, and before you even know what’s happening, the band launches into an all-out aural assault on your ears with brutally heavy instrumentation topped off with powerfully-delivered harsh vocals, and a good element is the fact you can still hear the female vocals in the background at points. The track then progresses in this manner for a while before stripping back into a melodic section accompanied with strings, almost like Ancestral Legacy have gone full-circle, and then once again there’s another heavy section. What a way to get Terminal going!
It’s a good insight into what you can expect from Terminal, in all honesty. Some of the songs are heavy, some of the songs are softer, and some are a mix of the two – and no matter what Ancestral Legacy have chosen to do in a particular song, you can bet they’ve done it to a very high standard. There’s plenty of riffs that will worm their way into your head, lots of moments asking to be sang along to – and for everything else, you can simply bang your head along to it!
Ancestral Legacy have certainly crafted something to be proud of with Terminal, and it is brimming with potential. This band has got the ability to go very far in the industry.
9/10
