Hate - Auric Gates Of Veles | The Gallery

Year: 2019
Total Time:2020
Label: Metal Blade

Poland’s Deathsters HATE are active for more than 25 years, having released, along with this year’s ‘Auric Gates of Veles’, 11 full length albums but never had gained a great reputation compared to other bands from their country, such as VADER, BEHEMOTH and DECAPITATED. In recent years and especially after their awesome 2017’s album ‘Tremendum’, in which they included Black Metal elements in their Death Metal sound, they attract the attention of extreme metalheads. The success of ‘Tremendum’ gave them the opportunity to sign with Metal Blade records and now they release their new album with the title ‘Veles’.

If we‘d say that in ‘Tremendum’ HATE managed to combine ideally the rough Death Metal sound with Black Metal and Slavic mythology, then in ‘Auric Gates of Veles’ we see that the band is trying to repeat the same thing, but this time without achieving the same quality level. That said, we don’t claim that ‘ Auric Gates of Veles’ is a bad record. It continues from the point where ‘Tremendum’ stopped, HATE offer us once again violent Blackened Death Metal with beautiful riffs and amazing vocals by Buszko. Lyrically they are in the same path of Slavic mythology and paganism. The truth is that we don’t expect HATE to be original or to redefine the extreme sound anymore, but being the album as good as it is, the band doesn’t avoid the clichés of the genre and the sound ideas that we have heard many times before. After a few playbacks, the album becomes tiresome, at first it will get your attention with all the aggression and stuff, but soon you will be bored and move on.

HATE, in ‘Auric Gates of Veles’ offer 8 songs of Death Metal grafted with Black Metal atmosphere and aesthetics, but unfortunately it is quite monotonous. Albums like this give us the answer to the question about why HATE all these years remains in the shadow of other Polish extreme metal bands.

Rating: 5,5/10

Nikos Manousis