Process of Guilt, now in their fifth full length in their 20-year career, prove that they are not one of the most prolific bands on the planet, but it must be said in their defence that their published works are so dense and impactful that they fill the gaps between one release and the next. The Portuguese band’s career took a decisive turn starting with the formidable Fæmin, where the previous and already very harsh death doom turned into a tarry sludge flow that gradually became more and more merciless, eventually bordering on incommunicable with this latest Slaves Beneath the Sun. Hugo Santos and associates hammer the listener and annihilate him with the force of a granitic riffing, a percussive dynamism not so common in the genre, and a voice that leaves no room for whispers or winking clean; Those looking for melodic crutches in Slaves Beneath the Sun are destined to slip into the deepest of abysses, because Process of Guilt‘s music offers no possibility of redemption or salvation, in a black-and-white world in which life has the skeletal and meager appearance of the character on the cover. On closer inspection, having listened to the devastating opener Demons, one could also press the stop button, given that the album’s sequel will not deviate from those coordinates one iota, yet we, like virtual lemmings, continue listening regardless of the existential abyss into which we will be plunged during these three quarters of an hour of music that confirms the value and inevitability of a band, such as the Lusitanian one, which has the strength to impose its own stylistic code without making any kind of compromise. Process of Guilt are the ideal singers of the discomfort of modern man, and in doing so they appear more integral and credible than many more celebrated realities among those stylistically contiguous.

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