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VANTA – PERPETUAL SELECTION
Available now via Independent - If Gothenburg taught melodic death metal how to move, and modern deathcore taught it how to feel vast, Perpetual Selection finds its voice somewhere in between. Grounded but reaching. Perth trio Vanta work from a European melodeath foundation, but this isn't a record content to stay there. The riffs carry a distinctly Gothenburg sense of lift, and the album is full of classic soaring moments where aggression gives way to something more expansive, but they're rooted under the kind of density and weight that belongs to a different lineage entirely.
Where bands like Shadow of Intent achieve scale through orchestration and sheer volume, Vanta finds scale within the riff itself. Melody, technicality, and aggression coexist within a single movement rather than competing across layers. This is a guitar-first record, and the writing comfortably justifies that choice. Lead lines thread through the density rather than sitting on top of it, hooks land with real precision, and for a debut, the consistency of the riff work is striking. Venus's vocals follow the same logic, shifting between rasps, growls, and rapid-fire delivery to match whatever the riff demands rather than sitting in a single register.
There’s a sense of forward motion that runs through the album's structure. "Sacred Light" demonstrates it cleanly: a measured build gives way to a bridge-like section that pauses just long enough to let pressure accumulate, before the drums move from driving beats into full blasts, the vocals open up, and the guitars keep reaching upward. It's one of many moments on the album that earn impact through escalation rather than decoration.
The sequencing reinforces this. Perpetual Selection breathes within individual songs but escalates globally - each track pushing further into technical and extreme territory than the last. By the time closer "Purity" arrives as a full tech death sprint, the destination feels inevitable rather than jarring, and it's where the band sound most unleashed.
The mix is largely well-judged for a self-produced record, though the cymbals sit too far back. In a record this guitar-driven, that's a counterintuitive loss — cymbal presence creates the high-end space that separates layers and gives riffs room to breathe. In the denser passages, that burial flattens the very texture the guitars are working to create.
It’s a minor concession on a debut that gets the harder things right. Vanta don't just combine influences; they coherently organise them. The result is a record that treats genre as raw material, not a constraint.
SCORE 8/10
Reviwed by Ryan Lind
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