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INNUMERABLE FORMS
Pain Effulgence

Profound Lore (2025)
Rating: 8/10

Boston, Massachusetts was never the same after this death metal mob began leaking material into the waters back in 2010. It’s been 15 long years since then and Innumerable Forms caused quite a stir in 2018 with debut Punishment In Flesh, which was followed in 2022 by the less impactful Philosophical Collapse.

Pain Effulgence continues the deathly trend, very much arcing back into the band’s doomier compositions: deep, yawning abyssal caverns contaminated by mouldy blusters which swirl feverishly in their own fetid spores.

If you’re unfamiliar with such stirrings of morbidity then I point you in the direction of the Finnish death metal scene for reference. Innumerable Forms play that eerie, churning style that comes peppered with strong, phantasmagoric solos. At times as soggy as a compost heap, Pain Effulgence laps at its own boggy shores, creating hefty mires of riffs which decompose further under the ghoulish guidance of the vocal stodge. The thick dense rivers of Incantation-styled horror congeal into cesspools of doom as the gloomy sediment hardens.

Innumerable Forms stick well within their familiar framework, robustly constructing pallid pillars of bone which come plastered in ash. ‘Impulse’ nods to the early atmospherics of Paradise Lost at times, a macabre sense of dread erupting from the glum beat of drums and frightful chords, while ‘Blotted Inside’ occupies the same fetid crypt as Finland’s Hooded Menace, the bass rumbling with absolute horror as if it were a ghost train still pummeling those now non-existent tracks.

‘Overwhelming Subjugation’ creeps with such a cavernous dread, the density of the guitars quite staggering as the combo oozes from the very bottom of Hell’s septic tank. ‘Ressentiment’, however, acts more like the unexpected phantasmal catacomb breeze, sweeping into the lungs like a gasp of unnatural air. The title cut brings us right back down to the bottom of the pit, a slow, lurking nightmare of dragging turmoil complete with spine of percussive thuds. Meanwhile, ‘Dissonant Drift’ brings bluster to the bludgeoning, still bulbous in its tirade but very much channelling the classic death doom premise of grinding grey gloom and toxic tumult.

This is Innumerable Forms at the top of their game and armed with a rhythm section bolstered by its weight gain. Somehow grandiose in its ethereal churning slumber, Pain Effulgence is very much an entity in keeping with the death-doom scene and yet one concrete foot seems esoterically placed elsewhere, maybe some otherworldly vacuum or cosmic coffin so that the combo may channel outside influence in their quest for dismal reign.

Neil Arnold

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