Fittingly formed during the doomed days of 2020, IN GRIEF soon set to work on putting their misery into sonic form. A power-trio, the band possesses a wealth of underground experience, with all three members having played in various bands over the past two decades, including such cult Italian acts as Profanal and Necro. Naturally, then, it only made sense to combine their death metal and doom backgrounds into purest, ancient DEATH-DOOM - and thus IN GRIEF was born. The Echoes of Doom EP came in 2020, followed by the demo An Eternity of Misery the next year. Bearing that same title, An Eternity of Misery is the full-length debut of IN GRIEF - and a grander debut statement one will not find. The formula is fairly simple - doom in form and content, death metal in execution, both crushing and crushingly somber - but the poignancy put forth through these eight odes to despair (and two equally heartstrings-pulling instrumentals) is powerful enough to penetrate even the most recalcitrant of souls. Lead lines soar with majesty and memorability, but where they "soar" is inversely an abyss of the soul; the effect is no less cleansing and cathartic. Like much/most melodically inclined doom-death, the spectre of "the Peaceville Three" - My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, and Anathema - looms large here, but one can equally detect trace elements of the earliest works of Katatonia, The Gathering, and especially Tiamat's pivotal Clouds. Which is all to say that IN GRIEF have honed in on an oft-done but rarely perfected idiom, and also including the band's sterling sense of space and dynamics, it's not remiss to suggest that An Eternity of Misery indeed seems perfected. Let those bleeding hearts run red: IN GRIEF's An Eternity of Misery will wring them dry.
