Wolf King - The Path of Wrath (2021)

San Francisco’s Bay Area has been the epicentre of some of the best and most blistering heavy metal for decades. Over the years, the long-time home of METALLICA has also produced the legendary likes of EXODUS, POSSESSED and DEATH ANGEL. It’s from this proud tradition of innovative and often abrasive metal that WOLF KING have emerged to grab the scene by the throat.

The Path Of Wrath is the four-piece’s second full-length album. It follows 2018’s Loyal To The Soil, a fierce, fiery 43 minutes of blackened hardcore with further extreme metal influences. That remains very much the blueprint this time around too, if anything with the metal turned up even more. The results make for a veritably vicious feast that touches on doom, hardcore, black metal, death metal, and more. It’s an approach not too far removed from the excellent CONJURER, in the sense of throwing a whole lot of heavy at the wall and seeing most of it stick. Admittedly that’s more a comparison of ethos and overall feel than of direct sonic similarity, but there is a sense that if you like that band you’ll probably find a fair bit to enjoy here.