There is a fine line between having a recognisable label style and becoming a sausage factory – to put it generously, Unique Leader Records have perhaps… tread a little too close to that line in recent years. They’ve got their stand-out bands like any label, but when an album has the Unique Leader stamp, you can safely expect the same clean production, growled vocals and super-technical Death Metal acrobatics that you heard on the last five.

On first listen, Kronos certainly aren’t out to rock the boat too hard, fitting very comfortably into the more brutal end of UL’s modern-tech-Death monopoly, but with a bit of patience they reveal themselves as not quite the clones you might initially peg them as. Firstly, they keep their technical side considerably more restrained than most of their peers, restraining the usual riff salad to a much tighter and more focussed attack. Secondly, their songs are much tighter than a lot of their contemporaries, sticking around the three-to-four minute mark and a limited set of riffs, which avoids the indulgence and technicality-for-its-own-sake that often spoils this kind of Death Metal.

Ultimately, at the risk of falling into the laziest of journalistic traps, how excited you can be about Arisen New Era will be determined by how much tolerance you have for Unique Leader’s style of brutal, technical Death Metal. There isn’t really anything here that people familiar with the genre haven’t heard before, but they deliver it with enough power and focus to stand out at least a little from the mass of their peers.

5.0/10

RICHIE HR