Album Review: Veilburner – Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy
Band: Veilburner
Title: Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy
Label: Transcending Obscurity Records
Release Date: November 14th, 2025
Country: USAFormat Reviewed: Digital Download
Album Review: Veilburner – Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy via Transcending Obscurity Records by Tom Osman
The otherworldly duo of Mephisto Deleterio and Chrisom Infernium, who are Veilburner, have been building their own unique, avant-garde, death-metal universe album by album since their debut The Three Lightbearers in 2014.
Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy sees the masked pair follow up their excellent seventh offering, (The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom, from 2024) with another record of twisted, shape-shifting metal.
Veilburner’s world and sound is immediately identifiable. In each successive release Mephisto hones his own idiosyncratic, extreme-metal guitar playing—razor sharp riffs and leads like melting iron in a blast furnace. Pummelling, programmed drums fall like fist-sized balls from the sky. Vocalist Chrisom, meanwhile, never fails to evoke a screaming horde of banshees raging out from the deepest void.
With the Veilburner world being one of continual exploration and evolution every album brings its own twists. For all the album’s extreme riffing, there’s plenty of groove too (notably on second track “Pestilent Niche”). “Ouroboreal Whorl” and “Matter o’ the Most Awful of Martyrs” both branch off into their own stomping death-metal domains (the latter suddenly shifting into an almost jaunty prog-rock guitar solo at the end).
In fact the album is peppered with memorable lead-guitar work by Mephisto (particularly on the previously mentioned “Pestilent Niche”. Alongside the different voices that Chrisom embodies through the album (whether shrieking, growling, gurgling or seemingly frothing) and the record’s flow, there’s a sense of several acts closing and moving onto the next chapter as the record hurtles (or stomps) towards its conclusion.
Conceptually, Chrisom continues to take the mysterious protagonists of the Veilburner story and lead them through a landscape of death and madness—the latest album exploring the unavoidable failures that must exist as a counterpoint to potential glory and their infinite recurrence.
The Veilburner experience is always an engrossing and mind-warping one and Longing for Triumph, Reeking of Tragedy shows the duo hurtling with as much poise and determination as ever into the infinite. 9/10
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