Austral - Tierra del Fuego (2024)

Country: Chile
Style: Folk/Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
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Here's something interesting that opens in highly unusual fashion. The intro, Hain, plays out with throat drone and ethnic drums, as if it's setting us up for a Mongolian metal album. However, the Latin scholars among you will know that "austral" means "southern" and so this band accordingly hail from Chile, where Tierra del Fuego is the archipelago at the very southern tip of that nation and its neighbour to the east, Argentina, curling out into the ocean where South America looks at Antarctica. That's a very different part of the world indeed to Mongolia, even if we factor in that Austral are from the Chilean capital, Santiago, three thousand miles to the north.

However, that intro isn't misleading us. This came to me as thrash metal, but there's lots of groove metal in that sound and there's an ethnic component that simply can't be ignored. The vocals are chanted as often as they're sung and that goes as much for Nicolás Araya's lead vocals as anything in the background behind him. Luis González plays the sort of drumkit you'd expect for a drummer in a metal band, but there's plenty of other percussion going on and that often dominates tracks. That's courtesy of Jorge Saldaña, who's also credited on wind instruments, which are something I would expect on a folk metal album but not usually on a thrash metal equivalent.

And so there's folk drumming and chanting on Temawkel. There's throat singing on Kólyot. Is that an accordion on Kawésqar? Weynwayer opens with what sounds like a didgeridoo, accompanied by bass, acoustic guitar and a throat drone, and, while it's quite a heavy song, it's not metal at all. Volveré kicks off with acoustic guitar and flutes. It does bulk up, as we'd expect, but never turns into thrash metal, with the piano remaining just as prominent as the guitars. Fiu Fiu (Futaleufú) starts out in a waterfall, I think, with more flutes and a singalong, before temporarily turning up the power.

What all this suggested to me is that Austral's primary influence is Sepultura, hardly unexpected for thrashers in South America, but they're still focused on 1996's Roots rather than whatever the band has done in the almost three decades since Max Cavalera left. Even then, Austral took their influence from the folk aspects in Roots but ignored its nu metal flavour. No turntablists show up here, there are no guest appearances from trendy Americans and the result doesn't sound much like Soulfly at all.

That means that the experimentation soars supreme as they combine metal with native sounds. A song like Sigilo can start out like a heavy metal song, but in what sounds like a rainforest, with an array of ambient sounds behind the riffing. It develops with clean vocals, but finds moments that grow in emphasis to harsher voices. Midway, it drops into tribal drumming, acoustic guitar and a fireside singalong. Then it bulks up again into more overt thrash tempos and adds a throaty vocal that plays with drone. Sure, it's a long song for this album, at four and a half minutes, but it's not really a long song and it crams a lot into that running time.

The same, on a broader scale, applies to the album. There are a dozen songs on offer that total about three quarters of an hour, and Austral cram a lot into that running time. This came to me as thrash metal and I have to point out that it's often not thrash metal and sometimes not metal at all. Will that affect its success? Maybe, because labels shape expectations, but it doesn't mean that this is a failure. I found it fascinating. Sure, there's an obvious influence but it's no copy. The least metal songs, like Volveré and Weynwayer, don't sound like anything on Roots.

And, frankly, the songs that follow them, which are Ley sin Dios and Tierra del Fuego respectively, mark clear returns to metal, often thrash metal, and yet still don't sound entirely like Sepultura. I hear them, but I hear a lot of other bands too, even I'm not going to call them out as overt. Would it help if I suggested that, for a while, Weynwayer sounded rather like The Hu covering Bon Jovi? I don't think so. Would it help to throw out Manu Chao as a comparison on Fiu Fiu? Surely not. That isn't what these songs are doing, even if they hint at it at points.

What matters, I think, is that while there's plenty of thrash metal here, I think it would be better for me to call this folk metal. I recommend a lot of thrash albums to my son, who's a big thrash fan. I'm going to recommend this to him too, but because of what it is when it isn't thrash rather than when it is. He's not as experimental in his tastes as I am, but I think he'd like where Dualidad and Kawésqar would take him.