Four years in the making, ORANSSI PAZUZU spew forth their latest mutational meisterwerk, Muuntautuja (or Shapeshifter in English) set to be released on October 11th, 2024 via Nuclear Blast Records. A boa constrictor of slithering, warping, interdimensional cosmic horror, Muuntautuja is in a world of its own, seeping through the speakers like irradiated sand. Ever transmuting, unsettling chords that raise the hairs on the back of your head and then pummel it with nauseating rhythms that both transport and destroy you. Muuntautuja is like an encounter with a maleficent being, well and truly unhinged, that’s out to mess with your brain. Where delays distort in a dust cloud, riffs are white noise discharge and time signatures interweave, to create the genre that ORANSSI PAZUZU inhabits alone. A convulsing mass on collision course, the air-borne sonic viral load of Muuntautuja is undeniably infectious, and bound to turn heads.
If Nasa discover a new form of metal element under the surface of Mars they would have to call it ORANSSI PAZUZU, a band that’s uncharted and pushing the boundaries of what heavy, extreme music should sound like. From their first spaced out underground Black Metal album Muukalainen Puhuu (2009), to second album Kosmonument (2011), their first album to get wider distribution, to their then-next record Valonielu (2013), which saw them delve deeper and weirder into Psychedelic Black Metal, setting the stage for Värähtelijä (2016), arguably their breakthrough record, ORANSSI PAZUZU have been impossible to pigeon-hole and a feast for those who dig deep, heavy and strange.
Not so much a reinvention of form as a creative zenith, where ORANSSI PAZUZU have struck a vein of gold in the wasteland, the irony of it is that Muuntautuja sounds like the album they have been diligently mining all along. Dense, ferocious, glistening, blistering and buzzing, Muuntautuja is like tuning in and dropping out to hostile alien signals. The title of the album, meaning Shapeshifter, is a perfect description of the ORANSSI PAZUZU that emerged from their extraterrestrial cocoon in 2024. A new form of being, but whose flesh is eerily familiar, Muuntautuja sees ORANSSI PAZUZU contort their signature noise into something truly fearsome from their critically acclaimed previous album Mestarin kynsi (2020). Noise has always been a part of the classic Black Metal sound but Muuntautuja takes it to a more shattering and violent culmination.
