Exordium Mors – Sworn To Heresy Review

There’s something to be said for a band knowing their strengths, forming more strengths, and then really leaning into them. In the case of Auckland, New Zealand’s Exordium Mors, those strengths include mastery of multiple riff styles and a tendency towards using their chops to annihilate whatever is in their path while somehow still maintaining a certain narrative quality. This is the violent sound of a medieval battle playing out as music, and while there aren’t any samples of sword clangs or shields being bluntly hit or horse hooves trampling bodies, all that stuff ‒ and of course the mud and the blood and the beer ‒ is heavily implied across the three brutally efficient songs of EP Sworn to Heresy.

Exordium Mors plays a particularly cacophonous hybrid of black, death, and thrash metals, leaning closest to black/thrash but not coming across as a straight Aura Noir clone. Sure, Sworn to Heresy includes oodles of fiery, razor-sharp tremolo lines and the types of “floating” rhythm work that great black/thrash features, but it also frequently gets down and dirty with ultra hefty death metal riffage, succeeding most when providing quick shifts between the modes. For example, “Oath” provides a great shift from the more churning brutality of say, Ares Kingdom to those blazing trem riffs, spiraling ruthlessly out of the murk to slice you with a hundred tiny knives, all the while clearly telling a dramatic, epic story, if you can focus enough to parse out the tale while so much is being tossed at your ears.

And that’s the real treat of this EP: how busy it is. Exhordium Mors refuses to stand still, both within individual phrases/passages and between them, and they manage this relentlessness with an attack that is as technically impressive as it is delightfully mean spirited. There’s an admirable and rather irresistible variety to the riff delivery enabled by such deft action on both the fret and pick hands; vocals are typically doing a pretty shredded blackened attack but occasionally add to that “epic” feel with militaristic spokals or some gang shouts (opener “Dawn of the Crimson Sun”); leads are chaotic one second and sophisticated and melodic the next; and the drums are constantly out to both impress and completely flatten you. Seriously, this guy does about everything possible to ensure that there’s never a remotely dull moment in which to get comfortable, but one thing he really does is love his snare drum, both with fills and the approximately 15,000 blast passages that he somehow stuffed into this brief runtime.

This one is positively packed to the gills with riffs and hot licks and shreddy leads and bonkers drum stuff. Sworn to Heresy causes complete devastation in just 17 minutes, the musical equivalent of a particularly fast squash match. So if you’re looking for a quick bite of destruction to clean out your brain after all that thinking man’s music you digest, you could do a lot worse than this maelstrom of extremity.