Blood Incantation pressed their second album, “Hidden History of the Human Race,” on November 22, 2019, and structured it the way a band does when they know exactly what they have. Three tracks on Side A. One track on Side B. That one track, “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul),” runs 18 minutes and 5 seconds. The vinyl format is not a gimmick. It is a statement about proportion: everything that came before was the approach, and this is the arrival.
The Denver quartet had already announced themselves with “Starspawn” in 2016 on Dark Descent Records, a debut that earned serious underground attention. “Hidden History of the Human Race” is the record that made that attention permanent. It was co-produced by the band and Pete DeBoer, who also recorded, mixed, and mastered it entirely analog at World Famous Studios in Denver, Colorado, onto ATR Magnetics 2” Master Tape through an AMEK Rembrandt console. The choice to record analog was not nostalgia. It was precision. The tape compression and the room bleed are load-bearing elements of the sound, and DeBoer’s engineering keeps the low end physical without letting it collapse into mud.
The band on the record is Isaac Faulk on drums, Paul Riedl on guitars and vocals, Morris Kolontyrsky on guitars, and Jeff Barrett on bass. Faulk is the engine. His kit sits forward in the mix with a clarity that lets you track every transition, and on a record built around transitions, that matters. Riedl and Kolontyrsky layer guitars that move between technical brutality and something closer to kosmische drift, sometimes within the same bar. Barrett’s bass is fretless, and it gives the low register a vocal quality that softens nothing but adds dimension to everything.
Side A opens with “Slave Species of the Gods,” five and a half minutes of compressed aggression that establishes the album’s terms. The riffs are dense and fast, the vocals guttural, the structure more disciplined than it first appears. Track two, “The Giza Power Plant,” runs seven minutes and begins to open the architecture outward, introducing the psychedelic and progressive elements that will dominate the second half of the record. The third track, “Inner Paths (to Outer Space),” is the hinge. At five minutes and thirty-eight seconds, it is the shortest piece on the album, and it functions as a decompression chamber between the brutality of the first two tracks and the enormity of what follows. The band has described it as a meditative passage, and it was written improvisationally over several months with all four members on psychedelics. At the end of the track, Antti Boman of the Finnish death metal band Demilich delivers a guest vocal performance, a low, cavernous growl that closes the door on Side A before the needle lifts.
Then Side B begins, and there is only one track.
“Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)” is subdivided on the vinyl into three labeled movements, but it plays as a single continuous piece. The structure follows the logic of 1970s progressive rock, where the long-form suite was the unit of meaning, not the individual song. Blood Incantation are explicit about this lineage. The track listing itself, three shorter pieces on one side and one extended work on the other, is a direct citation of that tradition. What makes it more than homage is that the death metal vocabulary never disappears. The brutality returns inside the suite, harder for having been withheld, and the ambient passages earn their weight because the band has already demonstrated they can destroy.
The album was recorded starting June 21, 2019. All four tracks had been performed live for the first time just weeks earlier, on July 13, 2019, at the Fire in the Mountains festival in Jackson, Wyoming. The band had intentionally written parts they could not initially play, then rehearsed them for over a month before entering the studio. That discipline is audible. The performances are tight in the way that only comes from having played the material until it stops feeling difficult.
The cover art is a painting by Bruce Pennington, a British sci-fi illustrator whose work appeared on paperback covers throughout the 1970s. The specific image, originally the front cover of Brian Aldiss’s 1957 novel “Space, Time and Nathaniel,” generated controversy in the metal community when it was revealed in September 2019, because the same Pennington painting had already been used by the Canadian death metal group Agony on their 1995 album “Apocalyptic Dawning.” Blood Incantation had chosen the image before recording their debut. The controversy did not slow the album’s reception.
Commercially, “Hidden History of the Human Race” topped the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart and reached the top 40 on Billboard’s Current Albums chart. For a record this uncompromising, released on Dark Descent Records in North America and Century Media Records internationally, those numbers represent something real about the audience that had been waiting for it. The album was named metal album of the year by multiple publications and appeared on decade-end lists alongside records that had far larger promotional budgets.
What the album actually accomplished was structural. It demonstrated that death metal could sustain a 36-minute argument, that the long-form progressive suite was not the exclusive property of bands who had softened their edges to get there, and that brutality and patience were not opposites. The 18-minute closer does not resolve into something gentle. It resolves into something vast. The difference matters. Blood Incantation did not make a record that asks you to meet it halfway. They made one that holds its position and waits for you to catch up.
