Album Review: Ominous Ruin – Requiem (Willowtip Records)

US extreme metallers Ominous Ruin are back, transformed by significant line-up changes, with their brand-new album, ‘Requiem’, out on May 9th, 2025, via Willowtip Records.

Now helmed by the fierce and enigmatic vocalist, Crystal Rose, this new album feels like a significant turning point for Ominous Ruin. Having spent many years (they formed in 2010) grinding away, this album feels like the record that pushes them upwards and into more ears around the world. It certainly helps that it’s an extreme metal banger with twists on the brutal, technical, melodic death metal, and even black metal genres.

Which might make it sound confused, but Ominous Ruin do a good job of combining all the intensity, allowing it to flow naturally between highs to lows, and offering up enough experimental ideas to make even the most hardened of extreme fans nod in approval.

Following a dramatic Intro that fails to prepare the mind for the explosive intensity that makes up the majority of the album, Seeds of Entropy arrives in chaotic fashion. Here, the extreme style of Ominous Ruin is on garish display, albeit warped by technical flair. It’s a beastly track, and not just because Crystal Rose sounds like a wild animal (although it’s certainly notable).

It’s the first of many beastly efforts, with Eternal showing more elaboration on the extreme genre-bending that makes this album so special. This is Ominous Ruin at their most vivid, and it’s a highlight, especially as it has some of the ugliest and heaviest moments of the entire record. Where that track is extensive, Bane of Syzygial Triality is just over two and a half minutes of ringing melody that ends in a horror-like way. It’s odd, a bit pointless if I’m honest, as the transition into Divergent Anomaly doesn’t have much impact.

Thankfully, this and the following Fractal Abhorrence will leave you seeing stars. Ominous Ruin at their best, as the former is ruthlessly heavy, and the latter’s tempo shifts with dramatic melody and atmosphere, is fascinating. This is the stuff that makes this band special.

Though, you’d be a fool to ignore the following Architect of Undoing, not just because it’s almost eight minutes long, but because it showcases the entire array of what Ominous Ruin are capable of. Erratically technical, emphatically heavy, absurdly energised, radically melodic in places, and aggressively delivered, it’s the album’s grandest effort.

Unsurprisingly, anything that follows that would struggle to capture the imagination in the same way, but credit to Ominous Ruin, they deliver a compelling listen with Staring into the Abysm, especially from a guitar and bass point of view.

Finally, it’s the title track to wrap things up in very satisfying, but very heavy ways. It’s another vibrant example of the creative meshing of genres, but the overpowering sound of melodeath is notable here.

A relentless blast of inherently addictive intensity, measured and detailed, Ominous Ruin have delivered something downright impressive here.

Ominous Ruin – Requiem Track Listing:

1. Intro
2. Seeds of Entropy
3. Eternal
4. Bane of Syzygial Triality
5. Divergent Anomaly
6. Fractal Abhorrence
7. Architect of Undoing
8. Staring into the Abysm
9. Requiem

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