#beyond creation

5:12 AM EDT May 18, 2026:

Beyond Creation - "The Great Revelation" From the album Earthborn Evolution (October 24, 2014)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

Progressive Death Metal Isn’t Always Pretentious: An Essay

This year marks eleven years that I’ve been a heavy metal fan, and the genre has changed quite a bit since then. I would say it’s changed both for the better and worst, namely that the genre is more inclusive when it comes to people who are straight white cis men being able to make music, but those same people (who are most often “real metal” elitists that I’ll talk about shortly) whine about metal going “woke” and how it’s not the same. The minority is almost always the loudest, but back a decade ago, it was the metal elitists that were the loudest. Those same people just turned into the bigoted losers that I was just talking about, but the elitist mentality is something that kept me from getting into heavy metal. I was into metalcore growing up, and that was “real metal,” but a lot of metalheads don’t think that.

I won’t forget when I listened to my first classic metal album, that being Metallica’s 1986 classic Master Of Puppets, because it blew my mind, but it made me realize that there is a whole world of heavy metal out there. Heavy metal has so many different styles to it, and it took me a long time to get into many different styles of metal, but there are a few styles of metal that I’m not super into. I talked about power metal pretty recently, but let’s talk about progressive metal now. Progressive metal comes in many forms, but at its core, prog-metal is an offshoot of progressive rock, where it’s marked by long, sprawling, and unorthodox song structures, as well as being more challenging and off the wall, versus being simplistic and straightforward. I never got hugely into prog-metal, and I’m still not, but I always found a lot of progressive music to be pretentious, mainly that those bands and albums focused more on making weird songs than having enticing songwriting.

I got into more extreme styles of metal soon after diving into classic metal, but I’ve always loved death metal. I love how heavy, aggressive, and you guessed it, fun the genre can be. When done right, it’s a genre that doesn’t take itself seriously, and just has a ball within itself. Death metal took a more progressive turn within the last handful of years, I guess because bands were getting bored with generic and old school sounds. Funny how that the 80s and 90s old school is in vogue again, but there are a ton of bands pushing the boundaries of where death metal can go and what it can do. I wanted to talk about three of those bands today; I was going to talk about each album individually, but I decided that I would just be repeating myself with each review, so I wanted to highlight these three albums for blending progressive-metal with death metal in such a fun and inventive way, especially to where the albums never feel pretentious or annoying.

The first of these albums that I wanted to talk about is the latest album from Horrendous, 2023’s Ontological Mysterium. This is an album that I missed out on when it came out, kind of because I had a lot of other stuff I was listening to, so I passed it on by, especially with not being into that kind of death metal. The Philly band was on my radar, but I just didn’t really care about them. I decided to pick up their new album after hearing some other prog-death albums, but this is a really interesting record that combines a lot of facets of death metal, and it’s also a very lean and quick album, clocking in at 38 minutes. It manages to have a lot of interesting and unique ideas and sounds, but in a compact package. The performances are impressive, too, and it never feels like the songwriting is impacted or that it’s taking a backseat.

The same things can be said for the next album I wanted to talk about, only that the circumstances are a little different. That album would be the sophomore album, Hidden History Of The Human Race, from Denver band Blood Incantation. That’s a band that I’ve wanted to check out for years, but they’ve been making waves for a long time now. They just dropped a new album last year that was critically acclaimed, but I found a copy of their second album at Half Price Books, and I was hyped. This record is one of their early albums, so their sound wasn’t totally realized yet, but it features a really cool mixture of death metal, psychedelic music, and more atmospheric and ambient music. The album is also only 36 minutes, but the closing song on the album is around 18 minutes, so that means half of the album is comprised of one song. It’s such a cool album, though, and really one of the best prog-death albums I’ve found in awhile.

The last album I wanted to talk about is admittedly my “least favorite,” but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I wanted to go up north to Canada by talking about Canadian tech-death / prog-death band Beyond Creation, specifically their third (and as of currently, their most recent) album, 2018’s Algorythm. I actually heard this album back in 2018 when it dropped, but it’s been a long time. I saw this album at Half Price Books, and I decided to pick it up, just to see how it is all of these years later. This is one of the first tech-death and prog-death albums that opened my eyes to those sub-genres, but I haven’t heard it in so long. I never reviewed it, because I wasn’t reviewing anything at the time, but I really enjoyed it back in 2018.

Listening to it all these years later, I quite like this album still, even though the album is a bit too long for my liking. It’s around 51 minutes, but luckily the album has enough going on that the length isn’t too bad. There’s a lot of tech-death and prog-death going on, but I can see it being a bit overwhelming for someone that wants something shorter and more straightforward. Out of the three albums here, this is my “least” favorite of the bunch, but not because it’s a bad album. This is the longest of the bunch, and if you know me, you know I’m not a fan of long albums. I like longer albums, but they need to be really solid or full of absolute bangers for me to really enjoy it all the way through. I do enjoy this all the way through, but this album has a bit too much going on, although it’s still great.