Published: December 23, 2023

 Far from an uncommon topic for metal but especially black metal, misanthropy is something that we can all relate to when it comes to metal music. We’ve seen it become an absolute pillar of what many different corners of black metal are able to bring to the table with all sorts of different approaches, styles, and executions able to deliver it in such a form that leaves us understanding why humankind is a bittersweet existence upon this world of ours. In the dense cities where the individual becomes less than nothing, it’s all too easy for those very same emotions to coalesce albeit in a different form than what we might expect in the realms of black metal. With their debut album, Urbain tackles that very subject with surprising quality and loads of passion.

There are few things that are as synonymous with black metal as a whole than the very concept of an unbridled, primeval, utterly cathartic scream into nothingness be it to defy that emptiness or a longing to be a part of its ever-expanding stillness. One tends to imagine such a theme as more of a metaphor more than anything else, but it’s in the concrete wilds of our cities that Urbain sought to bring them to the literal world with their debut album, “A Soul Purged”, seeing the Texan quintet deliver naught but immense justice to the concept. Nine tracks that show us the madness, isolation, and outright dystopian tendencies that occur within the towering hells where people corral together like cattle hoping to weather out a world-ending storm, “A Soul Purged” holds nothing back whatsoever as Urbain quickly shows us what they’re capable of. Rather than standing as an act with little more than some distortion, less than sub-par production, and howls for good measure, Urbain puts forth a performance driven by primal sorrow, the experiences of personal horror, and bleak but honest reflection upon the modern state of urbanization driven by evocative black metal that’s constantly backed up by synths and orchestrations that add real depth and even further despair to really allow the pits of depravity to open wide, consuming the listener in one massive, fell bite. As dense as the cities they seek to disassemble and as harrowing as the experiences that served as the unfortunate inspiration for such a creation, “A Soul Purged” is Urbain’s first step into the underground with it already showing off the immense power and promise that we can come to expect from the burgeoning act.

Where many associate the isolationism and disparity in cities in media with films like the 1978 movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, it is now in the world of metal that “A Soul Purged” and Urbain demand to be held within the same breath when concerning the topic. The walls are constantly closing in within these nine tracks as Urbain shows an astonishing aptitude at bringing terror to some of the brightest places on the planet with no hope left in sight and no one spared its hellish visages.