Altar of Plagues’ Teethed Glory & Injury:

The best album of the 2010s, bar none.

(a review by Aaron Freed)

A review of the Irish metal band Altar of Plagues’ masterpiece Teethed Glory and Injury, which I first wrote on 2022-08-05. In slightly belated honor of St. Patrick’s Day 2025, I’ve decided to adapt it to my website. For those unfamiliar with them, this album stands at the crossroads between black metal, post-metal, and (uniquely for them) industrial metal. It also contains substantially shorter songs than the rest of their catalogue, although it probably helps to think of them less as songs than as movements of a much longer composition.

My stance in this review hasn’t changed since I wrote it: no other album of the 2010s even comes close. You can buy it on Bandcamp from either Profound Lore (Canadian label) or Candlelight (UK label).

The review in its entirety (with extremely minor editing, primarily for brevity) follows.

This album stands in a class by itself. I can’t think of any other album that even comes close to matching it from the entire 2010s, and I can think of few works from any other decade that are even remotely comparable in quality. I can’t think of many stylistic peers either. The only obvious precursors I can come up with (in any sense, not that any of them sound much like this album) are Negură Bunget’s Om and some of Blut aus Nord and Deathspell Omega’s work (the last of which I’ve reviewed); and the only true spiritual successor I know of is Ashenspire’s Hostile Architecture (which I’ve also reviewed). Those records or artists don’t match Teethed Glory’s sound exactly, either, but I think they each describe a piece of the puzzle.

Because this album sounds so little like anything else, it presents a challenge to describe comprehensibly – a description of tremolo picking might convey the mechanics of how it is played, might even convey the basics of what it sounds like, but it can’t convey the chilly atmosphere it produces in the context of black metal. Likewise, although I will describe some of the musical textures Altar of Plagues uses on this album, mere text feels inadequate to convey the emotions they produce – and even if I could properly convey how any given moment of this album felt, none of them would be a quarter so powerful ripped from the album’s context. This album might have 9 tracks, but it really feels like a single 48-minute composition that demands to be listened to in one sitting (even if there are a few short gaps).

Even Altar of Plagues’ previous works hardly sound like the work of the same band. In retrospect, you can, hear how their earlier work served as jumping-off points for this album, but it’s clear Altar of Plagues wanted their third record to be something they’d never done before – in fact, something no one else had done before. And it most certainly is that. I can name only a few predecessors to even portions of this album’s style; perhaps, in exploring them, I’ll be able to convey some of why this album still bowls me over every time I listen to it.

So first, Negură Bunget – probably the pioneering post-black metal band, and obviously a big influence on all of Altar of Plagues’ work. Teethed Glory has moments that are quite serene and pastoral, but while Om is certainly a black metal album, it never has the harshness of this album at its angriest. I compare Om to Teethed Glory because they both possess atmospheres powerful enough to take you completely out of this world and absorb you into their own places and times. I’ve never visited either Romania or Ireland, but these albums have such strong feelings of place and time that Om has come to define how I’ve come to think of the former country, and Teethed Glory and Injury how I’ve come to think of the latter. I can make similar statements of few other releases. Negură Bunget’s earlier work (including Măiestrit, a remake of their second album) has harsher moments, but it’s harsh in different ways – Negură Bunget’s harshest moments come out of guitar distortion and vocals, whereas Teethed Glory, as often as not, gets its harshest moments from industrial metal textures that are nowhere found in any of Negură Bunget’s work.

Deathspell Omega and Blut aus Nord both possess the dissonance and experimentation of this album at its darkest, but it also has substantial differences from either. I could see both acts perhaps inspiring Altar of Plagues as much for their willingness to throw out black metal’s rulebook and do what they felt their music demanded as for their sound, though both acts’ willingness to mix dissonance and melody certainly is one parallel. This album at times possesses a cold, industrial atmosphere that I can understand comparing to Blut aus Nord’s, but Altar of Plagues uses it very differently; Altar of Plagues uses it as one colour of their palette, whereas it’s usually the predominant colour of Blut aus Nord’s canvas. This album has as many beautiful moments as ugly ones; Blut aus Nord has never quite attempted an album that flows as one piece the way this one does. They also have ugly albums with beautiful moments, and beautiful albums with ugly moments, but they’ve never really made an album that splits the difference quite like this one does.

Deathspell Omega’s compositional style is more overtly avant-garde and more influenced by twentieth-century classical music than Altar of Plagues’, but they share a willingness to mix dissonance and melody in a way I hear in few other metal acts. As I contend in my review of their second vinyl box set, even Fas – ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum, often considered DsO’s most dissonant album, in fact has plenty of melodic leads in places – it simply feels more dissonant than it is because of its oppressive production and especially because of its frantic drumming. Which this album also has in abundance.

This album’s most important characteristic is its intensity. “Burnt Year” has the single most tortured vocal performance I’ve ever heard, bar none. When Kelly (I think?) screams, “I watched my mother’s body raped by a prophet / I watched my son die,” he makes his horror and anguish so palpable you almost feel you’d witnessed those horrors yourself. (It’s worth reading this album’s lyrics in full – while metal lyrics often come across as almost afterthoughts, here they add significantly to the experience of the album.)

That said, if the entire album were that intense, it’d get repetitive, which would cause the most intense moments to lose some of their power. I’ve mentioned the band’s tendency to split the difference between harsh industrial passages and pastoral interludes, between dissonance and melody. Their pacing is impeccable; no section ever outstays its welcome, and they sometimes repeat melodic motifs between tracks in a way that helps the album feel more unified.

Singling out highlights is, in a sense, pointless – a flawless album has no lowlights, which likewise implies a lack of highlights. However, owing to the pacing, certain pieces build to especially memorable climaxes. I’d rank “Burnt Year” as one of these; “A Remedy and a Fever” and “Reflection Pulse Remains” contain a few others. But phrasing it like that makes those tracks sound like they tower above the rest of the album, which isn’t the case at all – indeed, they wouldn’t even work quite as well in another context, which I know because the band’s live album contains performances of some of the album’s tracks, and as great as they were live, something is lost by not having the whole thing performed start to finish.

Please forgive a brief aside on depersonalisation. Teethed Glory’s final words are “I am not here.” This is as concise and accurate a description as you could want of depersonalisation-derealisation disorder, a dissociative/anxiety disorder that I’ve become intimately acquainted with over the past five years, as I’ve suffered it off and on (currently more on than off, sad to say). Many of “Reflection Pulse Remains”’ other lines also fit with the diagnosis. Beyond its sheer quality and singular vision, I think one reason this album has resonated so strongly with me is that it’s one of the few musical works I’ve heard address depersonalisation in any way that speaks to me. The only others I can think of are Counting Crows’ works (vocalist/pianist/songwriter Adam Duritz has spoken publicly about his struggles with the disorder; also, they’re literally artist 1 in Rate Your Music’s database, suggesting that its founder was a fan of theirs), and to a lesser extent some of Nine Inch Nails’ work.

OK, aside over. I rank this as a perfect album because of its intensity, its quality, its complete lack of any historical predecessors, and its near-complete lack of spiritual successors. While you can find a few of those elements in isolation on other artists’ recordings, before this album, they were never combined as they are here. The band’s vision is completely unprecedented and uncompromising, and it’s raw with emotion in ways it couldn’t convey without the music’s intensity. This is metal because it has to be metal – no other genre would convey these emotions adequately or provide this level of catharsis.

Please permit one further aside. Before this year, I hadn’t heard a record that I’d have thought to compare to this record: it stood entirely alone, without peers or disciples. It now has one, and I feel compelled to mention it, as I think fans of each record will enjoy the other, and I suspect many of this album’s other fans have been equally distressed by its dearth of spiritual successors. Ashenspire’s Hostile Architecture is the first record I’ve ever heard that felt like a spiritual successor to Teethed Glory – and, per Ashenspire’s drummer and vocalist Alasdair Dunn, that’s no accident: Teethed Glory was Hostile Architecture’s most important influence. Between its pacing, its range of emotional moods, its overall rage and sadness at the world’s state, its style, its originality, its quality, and especially its intensity, it’s the first record I’ve ever felt compelled to compare to this one.

Of course, the two records don’t sound exactly alike – which is to be expected, since I cited originality as one thing uniting them. Among their differences: Teethed Glory doesn’t have saxophones or hammered dulcimers, while Hostile Architecture has fewer moments of serenity and more moments of fury. Nonetheless, their artistic visions are comparable and, in both cases, executed flawlessly. If you enjoy Hostile Architecture, I advise listening to Teethed Glory at the earliest possible opportunity; and if, like me, you’ve been wondering for nine long years when someone will finally follow up Teethed Glory, give Hostile Architecture a listen. (For those interested, I’ve written a lengthy review – essay-length exegesis, really – of Hostile Architecture.)

But enough about other bands. I had a hard time picking out an album of the decade at the end of 2019, but hindsight has made it apparent: it’s Teethed Glory and Injury. Nothing else from the decade has such strength of vision, emotional and stylistic range, execution, originality, quality, intensity. Other 2010s releases may rival it in some or even many of those qualities, but none rivals it in all of them.

Part of me really wishes Altar of Plagues had kept going, but I respect the hell out of them for saying there was no way on earth they’d ever top this, so why bother. It’s an admirable artistic decision to know when you’ve said enough, and they couldn’t have gone out on a higher note than this one.

—Aaron Freed
—2022-08-05

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