Huntress – Spell Eater (2012)

Seemingly out of nowhere, the American band Huntress delivers an early candidate for ‘2012 album of the year’ with their debut full-length “Spell Eater”. With over 40 minutes of hard-hitting Heavy Metal, the band’s attitude (and music) is as real as it can get when it comes to Heavy Metal. Led by the talented (and equally sexy) Jill Janus, this band is not your average mellow Metal female-fronted band, but rather a full-fledged war machine that will surely demolish your ears.

Taking influences from Heavy, Black and Thrash Metal, the album opens with the crushing “Spell Eater” track. The opening riffs scream Black Metal immediately, but as the song progresses and Jill’s vocals come through, the old-school Thrash influences seamlessly appear. This high-intensity track nicely marks the pace of a very diverse and extremely well crafted album.

The band blows through crushing tracks like “Senicide” and “Sleep and Death” with such a commanding attitude that will surely intimidate the most burly Metal head in the planet. The riffing is excellent and the sense of melody the band has is unrivaled by any debut release we have heard in a long time. A song that immediately caught our ears was the very melodic “Snow Witch”. In this track the riffing is excellent and creates a very powerful atmosphere.  Jill’s vocals give us a raspier version of Doro’s powerful pipes, but with her own uniqueness and aggressiveness.

The album’s first single, and the track that got Huntress in the map is “Eight of Swords”. In this very furious song, the band starts aggressively and suddenly moves into a very nice groove section that is super catchy and very head-banging prone. “Aradia”, “Night Rape”, and “Children” keep things very aggressive, with “Night Rape” and “Children” featuring Jill providing some growls and furious screams that are very well mixed into the songs complex guitar melodies and super catchy drumming patterns. “Children” is our favorite song due to the excellent musicianship featured in it.

Closing with the same high intensity as the album started, “Terror” and “The Tower” keep showcasing the band’s abilities to craft very entertaining songs that are traditional in nature and structure, but are very well crafted and memorable. In general, we have to say that “Spell Eater” is one hell of a ride and will blow away all fans of Heavy Metal. The band has a great sound and a solid singer (with a great live appearance) with Jill Janus, so we can’t really see why they can’t dominate the scene in the coming years.

Release: April 27th, 2012 (Europe) / May 8th, 2012 (USA)

Country: USA