Electric Wizard
– Dopethrone
Dopethrone pulls you under until your bones rattle and your vision swims in feedback haze. The riffs don’t move forward so much as they crawl, massive slabs of distortion pressing down with unholy weight. Jus Oborn’s voice sounds like a prophet mumbling from beneath a mountain, half-drowned in smoke and static. The whole record feels cursed, and that’s its appeal.
Best of…
The songs stretch out into endless expanses, but nothing here is wasted. Every riff grinds deeper, digging a trench the listener can’t escape. The repetition becomes ritual, a kind of hypnosis where time dissolves into vibration. The production is filthy, like it was recorded in a basement too close to the earth’s core, and that dirt becomes part of the texture. Every crackle, every rumble, every muffled edge reinforces the sense of decay.
There’s menace in every note. Not the sharp, theatrical kind, but something more ancient—like the sound of a ruin collapsing in slow motion. And yet within the decay lies a strange ecstasy. To be buried by this much sound is to feel something primal, like communion with the void. Few albums manage to feel this heavy, not just in volume but in spirit. By the time it ends, you don’t so much come back to reality as crawl out of a cavern, dazed and marked.
Choice Tracks
Vinum Sabbathi
An invocation disguised as a song. The riff is endless, dragging the listener into a swamp of distortion. Oborn’s delivery feels like a sermon to the damned, every word soaked in menace.
Funeralopolis
Pure annihilation. It lurches forward like a war machine fueled by smoke and rust. When the tempo finally accelerates, it feels like the ground giving way beneath you.
Weird Tales
A monstrous sprawl, broken into shifting movements. Each section feels like wandering deeper into an abyss, with riffs mutating into new horrors. The sheer length adds to its hallucinatory pull.
Dopethrone
The title track is the album’s statement of power: a riff as colossal as anything ever put to tape, crawling with unstoppable gravity. It’s less a song than a throne built from distortion itself.
Dopethrone is an oppressive, hypnotic descent into distortion and doom. Every riff feels carved in stone, every track a ritual of heaviness. Few albums suffocate and exhilarate at once like this one—it’s doom metal at its most monolithic.