Hilton Dive – I Am Become Death

Dutch metallers come forth with their latest offering titled “I Am Become Death” that doesn’t shy on heaviness or harmonic melodies. Before listening to this new release, I checked out an album before called “Huginn And Muninn”, these albums are about 4-5 years apart so it was exciting to see the changes made from there to now. I can positively say that the band has definitely stepped up their game since that first release. This new album expands in different ways compared to the previous effort and makes a big effort to include more variety and better showcase of song writing and musicianship skills. A big factor I saw this in was the vocals, the first release contained a rather monotone growl that was persistent throughout the five songs of the album, however this new release contained I guess I would call “pitch yelling” as well as normal clean singing, in fact on one of the songs titled 'Scars', (if I’m not mistaken) included a few sections that involved a woman singing. So coming into this release, the vocal variety had already gotten me hyped for where the release was going.

The album at times sounds like it is going into a melodic section, riff build ups as well as chords signify this but most of the time a consistent “harmonic minor” sound is kept through these sections which essentially stops the band from sounding “poppy” or “clean” during the songs. For those who don’t understand the concept of harmonic minors etc, basically the melodies sound evil and it gave me a good throwback to old school bands like Slayer when using this “devil’s interval” instead of going for the usual melodic section. Plenty of good riffs are thrown around during this release and I loved the outro track 'Fader' where the song fades away, but suddenly comes back repeating the same awesome riff for the next 2 minutes. In my opinion, this was a very Gojira-like approach to songs as that band also lets great riffs playout for extended times on their albums, so when I heard it on this release, I welcomed it with pleasure. The last thing I could also compare this to with the EP, is that the production quality on this release is top notch and sounds very professional.

I will end this review saying check these guys out, I have looked them up on Facebook and found that they deserve so many more followers than they currently have right now, check out Hilton Dive’s “I Am Become Death” for a headbanging time \m/


  1. Surrounded By Screams
  2. On Death Ground
  3. Behind The Mischief
  4. Disaster Of Puppets
  5. The 5th Horseman
  6. 'I Am Become Death'
  7. Pancurium Bromide
  8. Little Boy
  9. Scars
  10. Fader

Self released
Reviewer: Samuel Worsfold
Dec 28, 2015

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