Ad Infinitum - "Abyss"

This abyss could be deeper

With Ad Infinitum’s Abyss, I am simultaneously in familiar territory and on new ground. Symphonic Metal is one of the genres I feel most at home with, but Ad Infinitum is still a relatively new act, and they’re only just now catching my attention. They’ve been active since 2018, and have been releasing albums since 2020; Abyss is their fourth outing, with their first three albums (a trilogy) releasing in 2020, 2021, and 2023.

I’ll need to go back and listen through those three at some point — especially because I’m running into a consensus that Abyss, with its stylistic pivot, is the band’s weakest effort to-date. From Angry Metal Guy’s middling-at-best review to some dude commenting on the album’s Bandcamp page, the album is getting panned more than anything.

And, given that the band has pushed out four albums in five years, and tried to incorporate a stylistic shift in the process….that makes sense.

So let me try to break down this album as I hear it — because I do feel that its critics might be being a little too hard on it, myself (with the caveat that I am not familiar with their previous work). There are still strong Symphonic roots in these compositions, but the album isn’t raw Symphonic Metal — AMG’s Dear Hollow absolutely called that correctly, in my opinion, in their review. The album also leans into Proggier structures and styles, including djent, on many songs, and the way that the vocals are layered into the final mix is very poppy. With Melissa Bonny at the mic, though, it works well enough. Bonny is a powerhouse vocalist who is absolutely capable of carrying the band.

And let’s not rule out that that could be the point. Bonny is the sole founder of the act. It’s her project. On every track, she is the focal point. I mean, most bands sort of revolve around the vocal melody most of the time, but Bonny really is the driving force at every moment of the album. It never really feels like any of the instrumentation brings anything novel to the table, and that’s really antithetical to the spirit of Metal and the point of actually being a band — it may as well be a solo project.

If you looked at the AMG review, you might have noted the “modern Metal” concept that Dear Hollow brought up. The poppiness of the vocals and mix are part of that, but it also runs deeper. This album feels very Metalcore at points — specifically the high-gloss mixed-vox Metalcore of bands like Architects and Bad Omens. To a point, you could even point at recent Prog darlings Spiritbox, whom I love and adore.

The point here is that Abyss feels like a flubbed attempt to hop onto the bandwagon — there was a slip and almost a nasty fall, and everybody saw it and several people are laughing.

With all of that said and the album’s overall sound sort of explained, I don’t think it’s bad. It’s enjoyable enough for what it is, and I think it’s a serviceable gateway album. Bonny does occasionally slip into harsh vox (and does it well), but they’re brief moments of punctuation. The songs tend to wax heavy and wane ethereal, providing plenty of dynamicism. And some songs, like “Outer Space”, are genuinely solid.

Ad Infinitum has talent, but they need to decide on a direction, and they need to spend time honing their new sound if they want to stick to this pivot. Hopefully they won’t try to push anything out until at least 2026, and we’ll see how they’ve grown then.

Rating: Green