The Ajna Offensive is not such a well-known label, but you might know them from splendid releases from bands like Weapon, Acrimonious, Plecid-I or Ultra, as well as some nice split records.
A new act on their roster is the mysterious entity Head Of The Demon, a Lovecraftian combo from Sweden. This self-called album is their debut; it lasts for fifty minutes (the CD-version; the vinyl-edition was released last year and does not include the CD-version’s last track as bonus, Wraith From The Unknown).
The whole stands for a rather simplistic and simple yet, at the same time, ingeniously composed and performed form of Doom-injected Occult Metal with a sepulchral atmosphere. It sounds like a haunting and hypnotic form of lumbering and repetitive primal Black Metal from the first wave-era, psychedelic / psychotropic, a symbiosis of Sixties, Seventies and Eighties atmospheres transmorphed into unpolished yet stylistically uncomplexly-sludging darkness.
What about this: Celtic Frost, Furze, Mortuary Drape, Root, Evol, Negative Plane, Sleep and Black Sabbath melted into a moody and misty, freezing and frenzy, spooky and spacial mixture of basic elements, totally lacking of any progressive, modernised addition whatsoever.
No experiment yet an experience for sure…