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Singularity is De Lirium's Order's fourth studio album and clearly the band's most ambitious and ear-challenging work to date. Technical death metal can sometimes be something else, with mindless, nonstop blast beat mayhem, featuring more tempo changes in one song than you could possibly count. The lads have understood this very well and truly pushed the envelope on this album more than on any of their previous three albums.

The album starts with the one-minute intro "I Have Awakened", and that's just the calm-before the storm, with "Ayatollah" grabbing the listener into some unforeseen futuristic abyss beyond the point of return. The title track starts with an ominous, crawling warm-up until it explodes violently. On this song, they blend two very different vocal styles: Kari Olli's guttural death grunts and Mikael Salo's (who's one of the guests on the album, also playing in such groups as Metal de Facto, Dyecrest, Thy Row, etc.) clean vocals are a great match. On "Surfaced", they rush at hyper speeds at the beginning until they dig up one of the secret weapons out of their songwriting arsenal. They tune this monster-sized cyborg into some sort of Dream Theater jazzy, progressive and almost jamming state, and really starting to twist some musical boundaries around them. That's what I call a clever move within this type of a demanding subgenre of metal music. Don't take things for granted but always challenge them whenever it's possible to challenge them a little bit. "The Billion Year Contract" is the kind of a song that I would put on if someone asked me how futuristic tech-death metal sounds like. The song is full of sheer musical craziness, including guitarist Vesa Nupponen's lightning-fast fretboard techniques. "Acoustic Medley" is just as the title hints at, with one exception: Viivi-Maria Saarenkylä, the only female guest musician, plays a nice and ear-capturing accordion section at the end of the song. "Orion's Cry" is perhaps one of the weirdest numbers here, sort of wrapping up what De Lirium's Order is all about in 2019: constantly breaking musical boundaries. "Piazzolla" may surely sound unfamiliar to many metalheads, but the mastermind and driving force behind the band, Juha Kupianen, wanted to bring in a small dose of Argentine tango into this song. Viivi-Maria does a fine job with her accordion once again.

Last but not least, we get "The End of Time".The song is as wicked, surreal and apocalyptic as it gets, with many different tempo changes and layers and where Ukri Suvilehto (Abbath, Vermivore, etc.) did some rhythmic arrangement for the guitars.

Now there's just only question left: Do you dare give this a listen?