MOLOSSER – MOLOSSER

What stands out first is how much clarity this EP has. For music this physically hostile, the mix is surprisingly clear. The bass has attack, the drums are recorded with weight and definition, and the guitars retain colour even during the record's most violent passages. It is deep, ugly, and militaristic, but not shapeless. Molosser aren’t throwing mud at the wall and calling it atmosphere.

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There’s a war metal lineage present, (and naming your band after vicious ancient war dogs is a clue), but this isn’t clone worship. To these ears, Molosser are more considered, more interested in architecture than pure weaponised noise. Opener "Strychnine Hill" works through riffs and tempo shifts with more intent than its surface brutality first suggests. "Ogre Column" slips between militaristic blasting and doom-adjacent churn. It grooves and crawls on broken elbows.

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The closer, "Indomitable Force", is where Molosser becomes genuinely interesting. Sparse clean guitar opens the track before it’s smothered in vast distortion. A doom/death band surfaces inside the war metal chassis, creating a slow, suffocating stagger built from atmosphere and space rather than velocity. It’s the EP's most ambitious piece, and the version of Molosser that had me see the vision.

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I have to admit I struggled with the vocals. Not their ugliness, and not their execution, but their lack of movement. Molosser commits fully to the cavernous, single register gutturals the genre is known for. But there’s occasional vocal changes, like a blackened morph late in "Strychnine Hill", a register shift midway through "Vengeance Manifest" that capture vocal momentum and expression. These are the moments that grabbed my attention, and knowing the band could go there, it made the commitment to the immovable gutturals harder to sit with.

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Purists will say I’m missing the point. I probably am.

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SCORE 7/10

REVIEWED BY RYAN LIND