Big things are coming by way of BALMORA at some point in the year, but unless you’ve been living under a rock outside of the heavy music world, you already known this. The Connecticut band is a glorious bastion of hardcore and metal weight who have been touring relentlessly as well as hitting up the fest circuit for the last two years under the promise of their first EP, 2023’s With Thorns of Glass and Petals of Grief. Prologue is their second extended play, although it’s potentially a teaser for what lays waiting within the full body of their debut album, given its title.

Usually, these three-track releases play out more like brief maxi singles, but every song on Prologue makes the most from its stay, sounding like the full-blooded muscle-and-bone formation of BALMORA since they solidified their ranks as the five-piece of vocalist Senti, guitarists Jay and Collin, Lumpy on bass, and drummer Chaz. This is telling in how they’re delivering towering epics building staircases into the the sky through varying sheaths of riffs, bludgeons and breakdowns, gut-wrenching scowls that land somewhere between black metal and beatdown hardcore, and heaping melodic grandeur onto it all like they do on the standout, “The Day I Died, I Heard No Singing”, that homages the early might of Baroness. If this is just the setup to the rest of their story, the first chapter is going to be something else.

Highlights: “Blighted to Pine”, “The Day I Died, I Heard No Singing”, “Bloodlord”

BALMORA’s Prologue is available now DAZE / Ephyra Records.

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