Ulthar create something uniquely arcane within the Bay Area metal underground. The trio comes together on their debut full length Cosmovore to unleash its feral urgency for dizzying Absu-like black metal with death metal’s bludgeoning violence. Thematically heavy on weird and supernatural horror with a bizarre Rudimentary Peni-like surrealism, the band are a difficult to classify spectral entity.

Over the course of the album’s forty minutes, the band careens forward at primarily unrelenting velocity, with the opening title track instantly battering with primal persistence. The album’s middle section, a blinding storm of ghastly black dread, leads into the thirteen-plus minute epic “Dunwich Whore” where the Ulthar universe becomes all consuming with proggy synth bookends, vertiginous tempo variation, grinding technical violence, and thrashed madness.

Yet another stellar debut album released under the 20 Buck Spin banner, Cosmovore can be seen as the monstrous opening salvo for a band only starting to wage war.