REVIEW: Kostnatění – Přílišnost

Black metal maverick re-cannibalises Anatolian folk and sets fire to a high school's worth of breakdowns. Rejoice.

33:51 // November 7th, 2025 // Willowtip

Back in 2023, Kostnatění’s Úpal was just about the most forward-thinking event-album that anyone in my pocket of hoity-toity, part-time metal fandom could bite their thumb at. With its even-handed blend of wasps-nest black metal, microtonal Middle Eastern folk, visceral dynamics and refreshingly sandpapery production, that album served up an Anatolian explosion from a fix that hadn’t sounded so hot since the heyday of visionary NSBM-apologists Deathspell Omega. Kostnatění mastermind D.L. landed right on the map as one of underground metal’s most exciting innovators, and goodness only knows what we expected him to churn out next. Úpal was such a singular achievement that the mere thought of a meat-and-potatoes sequel practically has diminishing returns written all over it, something that D.L. himself seems to have noted and taken as licence to cut his irreverent side fresh lengths of slack:

Trying to make Ultra Mega Úpal 2 just wouldn’t have been a wise move artistically, and it wouldn’t have been fun to make either [...] That’s where the “lowbrow” influences came in handy as a natural sidestep, and they are all drawn from obsessions in my teenage years: Slipknot, slam death metal, Behemoth, Nails, Anaal Nathrakh. That’s not a knock on these bands at all, by the way—I genuinely love and embrace them—but they are probably not highly regarded among people who love, say, Esoctrilihum. One of my main goals with this album was to make something that was unquestionably underground in spirit, but also outright fun and enjoyable (while also not being tongue-in-cheek or zany).

– Kostnatění, in conversation with Invisible Oranges.

So it goes for his latest LP Přílišnost, which takes the Czech word for excess for its title and milks that concept for all it’s worth. This record is a raucous crash-testing of his signature sound, equal parts bespoke-crafted cheap thrills and arthouse cowabunga, and leaves nothing off the table, cackling end-to-end at any elitist notions of where it is/isn’t appropriate for a black metal project to venture. The gates, as they say, are under attack, but I most certainly will not be the one keeping them this time around — this album moves too fast, too engagingly for me to sleep over how much of it ultimately sticks against D.L.’s cratered wallpaper.

In cold, hard, analytical data, this sounds like a ‘whole bunch of shit’, almost all of which prompts kinetic engagement, almost none of which stays in the same groove for long enough to overstay its welcome. You can take the mean-eyed, mid-tempo beatdown of Úpal‘s “Skrýt se před Bohem” as a partial teaser, but there’s really no fair warning for the suite of vicious delights in store here. On the digestible end, you’ve got a solid-but-safe interpolation of Sabbathian stoner riffs in “Samotář”, or “Zpět ke kmenům”’s backend flirtation with the most tuneless margins of death metal brainrot (laudatory!?); take things up a notch, and “Dále zvenčí”’s superimposition of nu-metal uggabugga vox over nauseous Blut aus Nord-adjacent dissonance is plain hysterical, while “Čelist utlačovatele k obrubníku” marks one of the album’s most convincing crossovers with the cues it takes from freeform noise rock (think Laddio Bolocko at their most debased).

On the whole, these twists integrate surprisingly slickly with Kostnatění’s folk-infused abrasion — and when they don’t, the results are entertaining enough to earn their keep (see “Znal jsem tě”: less Paracletus and much, much more “Personal Jesus”). Savvy enough to open and close with a bang, D.L. saves his most bombastic fireworks for the bookends: opener “Dokonalé křišťálové město” kicks off with maximum whiplash, more rave than mosh with its clattering breakbeat and guitars blaring like air-raid sirens, every passing second a fresh echo of what the hell am I listening to, while the title-track rounds things off by dialling in exactly the calibre of eye-popping, skull-crushing slam breakdown that a release this set on dopamine violence demands.

What’s the sum of all this? Can you whip a coherent album out together by creatively mangling every Good Time in sight? Goodness knows how many acts have struggled so very hard to answer in the affirmative, but for Přílišnost, self-destructive burnout is just another trough to fress in. That notion of chaotic, unsustainably self-serving indulgence informs the album’s emphasis on moment-to-moment pyrotechnics so luridly that it carries as a statement in itself; Kostnatění dishes out such a forensic exhaustion of just about every gratification instinct in the human skinsack that, by the time the album finishes playing and I am left suddenly desensitized, in silence and uncertainty of what on earth to do with myself next, I will charitably assume that this is a pyrrhic testament to its strength rather than an anti-climactic by-product. With such relentless overstimulation, the last thing on anyone’s mind should be to ask for more. Encore.

8/10

Further listening:

Kostnatění - Úpal
D*athsp*ll Om*ga - The Synarchy of Molten Bones
Sigh – Shiki
Sleepwalker - Skopofoboexoskelett
Duobetic Homunkulus - Ani já, ani ty, robit něbudzeme šedněme do koča, vozit še budzeme