Phantom - Withdrawal (Black Metal)

Withdrawal, an album released exactly five years after Phantom's ground breaking debut Divine Necromancy, is possibly the greatest metal album of all time.

This album pushes all aspects of heavy metal music to their limits, and somewhat ironically, transcends the genre itself by doing so. The music on Withdrawal is so extreme in terms of the dissonance, tempo changes, and song structures, that it barely resembles any traditional metal music. Not even the most extreme black metal or death metal can come close to the horror unleashed by Withdrawal.

The guitars play mind blowing riffs made of lightning-speed tremolo picking, sometimes finding harmony, sometimes eerily diverging into dissonant polyphonic sounds, as Phantom would later perfect on albums such as Fallen Angel or Mindless Horror.

The dark and morbid atmosphere, created by the complex arrangement of hypnotic phrasal riffs into very intricate labyrinths of sound, is the defining element of Withdrawal. This album takes the cavernous sound of Incantation and adds ten times the horror-filled evil atmospheric component.

Withdrawal is the pinnacle of raw atmospheric black metal. Having an atmosphere so deep and entrancing that no listener will be left unchallenged, this is the album that defines the Phantom metal sound. A truly revolutionary black metal album.