MORTUAL - Altar Of Brutality CD

Following their fascinating EP from 2023 "Evil Incarnation", Mortual presents their first full-length album "Altar of Brutality", an album that sounds fresh, dynamic, and organic from the first song to the last. Overall, this album follows the same style of the previous EP, but with an improvement production-wise. That EP was brutal and I listen to it pretty often, but my only complaint was the production, it is not bad but it sounds a bit unpolished for my taste, you can perceive a wall of sound at some moments. Of course, when the music is so good you don't care about minor details. "Altar of Brutality" keeps the quality of the music and the composition, but this time the production is perfect in my opinion. There is no wall of sound here, all the instruments sound clear enough so you can recognize what they are playing. The guitars sound crushing, with the typical production of 90s death metal. The bass is clearly audible and it helps accentuate the brutality of the guitar riffs, and the drums sound polished enough. One of the things I usually dislike about modern death metal is the overproduced sound of the drums, but this band has nothing to do with that, they achieved an appropriate production that reminds of the 90s, it doesn't sound overproduced but at the same time sounds improved and more polished than their previous work.