EP Review: Drēor - Hell's Kitchen
Reviewed by Sam Jones
It’s time to look towards a promising, upcoming band out of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Here we have Dreor who have only been around a short number of years and yet find themselves upon numerous significant lineups. My personal discovery of the band was last year when Dreor supported Atheist and Cryptopsy in Derby, and I was highly taken with their keenly old school style of death metal. Releasing their first EP, The Terror Rises, in 2023, this new release sees the band return with another EP or mini-album under the name of Hell’s Kitchen. What makes this EP curious is the band have written it along the lines of a horror story split across the 6 distinctive tracks, where each “meal” served underpinning the EP’s title slowly garners more perverse and frightening calibre. You don’t see many concept EPs like this and thus I was looking forward to diving in. Hell’s Kitchen shall be released independently and therefore Dreor’s Bandcamp is the place to go come its release June 13th.
Though an EP is generally a little rougher than an album release would be, Dreor have gone out of their way to ensure Hell’s Kitchen feels the furthest thing away from footing or smooth as possible. Their production is coarse, the riffs aren’t emanating from guitars but that visceral scraping of sandpaper; one can imagine this performance originating in the deepest, dankest dwelling with only the minimum of light. Even as the guitar work slides to a halt, you still feel the lingering horror of that raw tone, never dissipating, never losing its edge. There’s very little occurring here that can soften the impact; it’s to the point, no niceties included herein to cushion it and since there is no softer padding implied through the production there’s nothing to detract from their murderous battery.
What is interesting about their songwriting is how Dreor don’t aspire to just kill us dead with massive slabs of riffs or blast beats as is the wont of many of today’s extreme metal. That said, the band do incorporate multiple instances whereby their soundscape is much bulkier, and you can feel the shape of their sound morph from a scorpion’s tail to the raised fist. However, the majority of their performance utilises writing that sees that smaller, more piercing style of playing come to a head. The key strength to Dreor’s playing is bound up in these more minute implementations where their guitar work brings forth horrific, stabbing licks that don’t need a huge swathe of power behind them for their impact to resonate.
Given death metal’s affinity for vocals that resemble gargling broth, it’s a nice change to recognise a delivery that’s not only fierce in timbre but is surprisingly intelligible, and can thus be followed easily. I think it’s something a production such as this really benefits as the raw, stripped back aesthetic allows the vocals to find us without having to pass through copious barriers of production that could then be additionally overpowered by beefed up instrumentation. Each member imparts vocals here and I can happily say all deliveries are strong and memorable; you have something more guttural, one delivery is more blackened whilst another is a little more mid-range. It keeps variety nicely fresh knowing we aren’t going to hear the same vocal delivery all the time. It also takes sole responsibility of vocals away from one person too, spreading it across the full band and thereby giving this EP the ethos of being a full band’s effort to make the best possible impression on you.
In conclusion, Hell’s Kitchen is a quality record that I thoroughly enjoyed. If Dreor in the future released a full length just as this EP is produced they’d find no qualms from me, for I easily took to the unrefined style they play with. Closing out their EP with the longest track on record it felt like a real conclusion to the effort such a small band put towards this release. Not many bands their age attempt anything along the lines of a concept record so it details promising things to come from Dreor. But since the band aren’t beating us over the head with their production, it gives us leeway to return to their release again and again because we know it’s nothing we can’t handle. In actuality encountering this kind of EP might be a blessing for many, having grown despondent towards many heavily produced and slaughtering records this day and age. I think Dreor are much more to offer and when they announce news of their first full length, I’ll be there front and centre. A great EP of an upcoming band.
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