Andrew Hudson: Vocals / Guitar
Tom Richards: Bass / Vocals
Leigh Bartley: Guitar
Glen Trayhern: Drums
It's now 20 years since four fresh-faced Australian teenagers from the eastern suburbs of Melbourne hastily assembled for a high school thrash metal performance. They chose the name Harlott, largely on the basis that it would look good on a black t-shirt. After seven years of paying their dues, they self-released one of the 21st century's hottest thrash debuts, 2013's Origin. Eschewing the garish, retro aesthetics of the contemporary thrash revival, Origin connected powerfully with the genre's first principles of speed, darkness and violence. The band sharpened their blades on 2015's Proliferation and 2017's Extinction, completing their foundational trilogy and confirming Harlott's mastery of breakneck, high-tension thrash, atavistically classic but with their own modern twist. Harlott made sure those first principles were kept alive and hungry - even while dropping some legitimately hilarious video clips along the way. Detritus Of The Final Age in 2020 saw the band opening up new avenues of inspiration, expanding their sound and skill set while maintaining their rattle-headed momentum. After an unprecedented six-year gap, the magisterial Exsequiis represents the boldest leap forward in the band's career so far.
"Detritus… was a great experience in digging out sounds and ideas that we would have been too trepidant to explore," explains the band. "For Exsequiis we kinda lent further into that, but with the confidence that it would work as it had done before." Examples of this confidence rain down from the outset, with intro Incipiam acting as a guitar fanfare of sumptuous melodies that would make Dave Murray green with envy, cueing the haywire carnage of Void. Blastbeats and trebly guitars add a black metallic intensity to Messiah Simplex, while the scampering riff patterns of Vice Borne give way to a mighty bouncing earworm of a chorus. This song, and many others, become a glittering showcase for the guitar solos of Hudson and Bartley, another feature of the Harlott sound by now mastered to world class levels, a perfect blend of precision and spontaneity. "I would estimate a 50/50 kind of approach to preparation and inspiration," confirms the band. "The ideas are always there, but it's often a matter of capturing lightning in a bottle."
When describing the band's creative process on Detritus Of The Final Age, Hudson commented: "Whether it's lyrics or riffs or breakdowns, I always make sure that every song has at least one bit that makes you go 'fuck yeeeeah'." With Exsequiis, Harlott triple-down on this strategy, ensuring the "fuck yeeeeah"s are continuously overlapping for 46 minutes. Although undoubtedly a band with their own intrinsic identity, there is still much fun for the dedicated thrasher in spotting specific inspirational moments - a pinch of Arise-era Sepultura here, a 90s Overkill groove there, the odd touch of Testament technicality or crossover gang chant. However, when asked what Harlott regard as thrash metal's gold standard, the response is unequivocal: "Does anyone ever answer this question with something other than Reign in Blood?" Rick Rubin's razor-sharp, in-your-face production on Slayer's 1986 benchmark release is a fair pointer to the sound of Exsequiis, the band's fullest, harshest sound picture yet. Tom's bass is especially well served, with an interesting tonal dominance in certain passages, but every layer is rammed upfront for maximum head-caving impact.
Lyrics remain in the depressingly real world, the band preferring not to embroider some supernatural phantasmagoria but instead casting a jaundiced eye over our bitterly divided current climate. "It's been a pretty interesting time to live through politically and socially," notes the band. "Disinformation appears to be the new normal and a population obsessed with content creation and online participation has really exposed some things that I think we were all probably happier being ignorant of." Curious titles like Kleptogenesis and Messiah Simplex play with concepts of biology and geometry, while the intriguing album title - a Latin term denoting funeral processions - is beautifully illustrated by Shaun Farrugia's atmospheric sleeve art. "[Shaun] has an incredible talent for bleak artwork," enthuses the band. "He also fronts In Malice's Wake, a fantastic Aussie thrash band. As usual the idea was to continue from the existing themes of the earlier albums, and the only thing that would logically come after the destruction of society was the death of the gods that made us. The album cover represents a funeral procession for a burning deity."
What comes after that is anyone's guess. In the meantime, savour the death of the gods at the hands of these thrash metal artisans in the prime of their lives.
