Astral Fortress are a band from Rhode Island that plays a melodic mixture of black and death metal and this is a review of their 2023 album "Spawn Of the Stars" which will be released in April by Elevate Records.
A sci-fi orientated intro starts off the album before introducing melodic guitar solos and leads into the music which also takes the recording into more of a heavier direction. All of the musical instruments also have a very powerful sound to them and the riffs also add in a decent amount of melody.
Vocals are a mixture of black metal screams and death metal growls while the faster sections of the songs also add in a decent amount of blast beats. Most of the music is also very heavily rooted in the 90's style along with the faster riffing also adding in a decent amount of tremolo picking and spoken word parts are also added on a couple of songs.
Clean playing is also added in certain sections of the recording along with the songs also adding in a good mixture of slow, mid paced and fast parts, melodic singing and keyboards can also be heard briefly as well as a few tracks also being very long and epic in length. The production sounds very old school while the lyrics cover the writings of H.P Lovecraft, space, astrophysics and horror films/books.
In my opinion Astral Fortress are a very great sounding melodic mixture of black and death metal and if you are a fan of those musical genres, you should check out this band. RECOMMENDED TRACKS INCLUDE "Unanimated Matter" "The Dunwich Horror" and "Cosmic Void". 8 /5 out of 10.
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