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Finnish thrashers Inkvisitor are back with another album, the follow-up to their debut album, Doctrine of Damnation, released in 2016.

Dark Arts of Sanguine Rituals is a concept album based on some sort of neo-noir murder mystery in which each song gets linked to each other lyrically, and was basically built like the church of Isaac, piece by piece, due to the fact that the band went through some pretty radical line-up turmoil since the time of the band's debut album. The band's brains - songwriter and guitarist Jesse Kämäräinen, is the only one left from the band's recording line-up of the debut album.

Musically, Inkvisitor have clearly widened their spectrum, adding bits and pieces into their songs that are at times unconventional and unorthodox in the Thrash Metal textbook. Take for example the title track, in which they stretch their walls of riffs into the murky side of Death Metal, well, just slightly but still. "A Shadow Suspended by Dust" kind of reminds me of Entombed A.D. with some hardened bulldozer riffage rollin' you over mercilessly. On "Quagmire Twilight (Deleted Scene)", they venture as far from their original Thrash Metal constructs as they can: they go psychedelic Doom Metal. And at that, they do sound surprisingly good. However, this song would better be reserved for another project as it really doesn't fit the album. On songs such as "Second Sacrament," "Paradigm Shift (with a surprising Black Metal card)", and "War Is Path to Victory," these lads swim in the safer waters again where the band's Thrash Metal muscles get harder for immediate punishment. These three songs are 100% guaranteed Thrash; aggressive, vicious and in-yer-fuckin'-face, just churned out the way we like them, right? However, one of the most impressive numbers off the album is undoubtedly "Necromancy Cascade," which oddly and distantly tends to remind me of some of Stone's most musically ambitious and trickiest stuff on the band's last album, Emotional Playground, released in 1991. This may be a far stretch, but this is how I felt when listening to the song.

It's pretty darn clear that Inkvisitor have put loads of time into coming up with something as strong as Dark Arts of Sanguine Rituals is content-wise, and I can sincerely say it has paid off for them. Good job, guys!