Ancestral Fury Unleashed: TURIAN Redefines Heavy on Blood Quantum Blues (Album Review)

BY STEVE THIRIOT

Let’s cut the niceties and throw you into the pit: TURIAN’s Blood Quantum Blues isn’t just a record—it’s a reckoning. It’s the kind of album that shreds skin off ideology, claws through generational trauma, and leaves you baptized in a cocktail of molten riffs, synth scorn, and ancestral rage. This isn’t background music for your dystopian gym playlist—this is the dystopia screaming back at you with broken teeth and clarity.

I ported Blood Quantum Blues to MiniDisc and let it rot my brain, cruising in my '97 Chevy for weeks—no Bluetooth, no skip, just chrome-on-concrete fidelity tearing through my speakers like a sermon from hell. Windows down, Volume at 11, TURIAN’s sonic firestorm became my road soundtrack and ritual invocation. Every shriek from Vern Metztli-Moon echoed like ghost radio from another realm; every breakdown in Chemical Bath felt like the axle might snap. It wasn’t just listening—it was communion at 60 mph, asphalt therapy for a world circling the drain. 

Listening to this album from archaic formats aside; Seattle’s metallic hardcore mutants have always flirted with chaos, but on Blood Quantum Blues, they stop flirting and go full lust-murder. Gone is any pretense of restraint—this is TURIAN’s identity crystallized in 10 searing tracks of uncompromising art-metal carnage, genre-bending precision, and cultural exorcism.

Imagine the bastard child of Converge, Godflesh, and Dälek being raised by the ghost of Native resistance in a war bunker. That’s what Blood Quantum Blues sounds like. From the opening blast of Spill, it’s evident TURIAN has leveled up. Guitars churn and cleave like precision machines on Chemical Bath (Arguably my favorite track on this album), while the rhythm section dislocates your spine and resets it sideways. Andrew Nyte’s drumming is outright feral—syncopated chaos grounded in surgical fury—while Cris Sanchez’s bass throbs with the menace of impending collapse.

But it’s the subtle electronic elements that elevate this record from hardcore savagery to visionary hellscape. Carlye Nyte’s synth work doesn’t just decorate the songs—it weaponizes them. Tracks like Nite Flights and Mache dissolve genre boundaries entirely, letting blackened breakbeats and distorted drones coil around your brainstem like cybernetic eels.

And then there's Vern Metztli-Moon.

Vern doesn’t sing; Vern summons. Every shriek and growl on Blood Quantum Blues is saturated with historical weight and personal fury. There’s no safe distance between performer and material—this is someone bleeding into the microphone, exhuming centuries of silenced grief with no filter, no compromise.

On Burden of the Blood, Vern channels a pain that feels both intimate and infinitely old. The title track Blood Quantum Blues is a spiritual purge, shifting between spoken-word trauma testimony and guttural expulsion over a dirge that sounds like a haunted oil rig collapsing in slow motion. 

Blood Quantum Blues is a genre-crushing, heart-flaying, mind-expanding statement. It's one of the most vital metal records of the decade, not just musically, but culturally. TURIAN aren’t interested in fitting into the scene—they’re burning the scene down and building something sacred in its place.

You don’t just listen to this album—you survive it. And if you make it through? You’ll come out changed. This Album will not be leaving my stereo anytime soon.

Album Drops June 6th On Wise Blood Records

(SOURCE DEATH BY MUSIC)