From Invocation to Benediction: Khemmis Conjures Their Defining Statement – Album Review

There is an argument to be made that choosing to self-title your fifth album is an act of either supreme confidence or delusion, with very little room between the two. For Khemmis, the Denver-based doom metal quartet who have spent the better part of a decade building one of the most singular bodies of work in contemporary heavy music, the answer is clearly the former. Khemmis – arriving eleven years after the band’s first tentative steps on their 2013 EP of the same name – is not a statement of reinvention. It is something rarer and more difficult: a band arriving at the fullest expression of what they have always been.

The context matters. Hunted (2016) made the international case for Khemmis with a Decibel Album of the Year that proved the band’s alchemy of funeral-paced doom and melodic heavy metal harmonies was not a novelty. Desolation (2018) showed them willing to stretch the template toward something rawer and more rollicking. Deceiver (2021) represented the sharpest execution of their mature sound – economical, emotionally exhausting, precise. With that record as the immediate predecessor, the question was always whether Khemmis could move forward without simply repeating themselves. They answer it on track one.

The album is structured as a ritual — not metaphorically, but architecturally. “Invocation of the Dreamer” opens the ceremony; “Benediction Tones” closes it. The vocabulary is deliberate: invocation, benediction, sacrament. Guitarist and vocalist Ben Hutcherson has described the record as “an invocation of the joy of heavy metal, as a ritual,” and the opening track’s lyrical content bears this out with an unsettling density. The speaker summons something through music itself – black candles, an altar perfumed with sage, an offering written on “perdition’s final page,” the cardinal directions invoked like the casting of an occult circle. The line “In my dreams a chord resounds / Struck in silence, ringing out / Sacrament of sacred sound” makes explicit the album’s thesis: the act of playing heavy music is the ritual, and the ritual is transformative. “Breathe unto me / Pull the tether from my throat / Insanity rides a hope that swallows me” – hope, here, is not comfort but an overwhelming force, something that undoes the speaker entirely. For a band whose previous work leaned heavily into the weight of loss and suffering, framing surrender to music as the path through is a quietly radical move. The ritual does not remain celebratory for long, however. By the time “Beneath the Scythe” arrives – fourth in the tracklist, after the galloping momentum of “Corpsebloom Garden” and the melodic exhale of “Grief’s Reverie” – the ceremony has descended into something darker and more psychologically complex.

What follows is not, however, a triumphant procession. The ritual requires confrontation. “Beneath the Scythe” operates at a psychologically darker frequency than the opener’s ecstatic self-offering. The imagery – a faceless figure stalking through durum fields beneath a harvest moon, “fathers kneeling, performing rites that make him real” – literalizes the transmission of generational trauma through ritual repetition. The scythe figure is not supernatural; it is psychic inheritance made flesh. The most devastating passage in the song is also its most precise: “So many years ago / The child now fades / But repeats in my bones / The bargains I’ve made / To conceal the pain.” The wound does not heal – it echoes. The chorus complicates this further, because the armor that shelters the speaker is also the thing that costs them: “This armor curled cuts the flesh away / Stealing fire from my heart.” The protection and the damage are the same structure. Read against the album’s ritual arc – invocation through benediction – “Beneath the Scythe” establishes what must be faced before any benediction is possible. The ceremony is not clean.

Musically, the track is among the most complete Khemmis have written. The dueling guitar solos of Hutcherson and Phil Pendergast – a signature device the band has refined across every record – are deployed here with particular emotional economy, and the bass interlude from David Small, making his recorded debut with the band after joining in 2022, opens a space that makes the track’s emotional center breathe. Small’s integration into the rhythm section alongside drummer Zach Coleman has clearly been transformative; where prior albums occasionally felt like the bass was present rather than essential, Khemmis gives the low end genuine weight and dimensionality. Pendergast and Coleman have both relocated from Denver since Deceiver – Washington and North Carolina, respectively – and recorded this album at Flatline Audio with producer Dave Otero in full-immersion sessions that Coleman describes as more focused than anything the band had done previously. That focus is audible throughout.

Across the album’s eight tightly sequenced tracks, the band moves through every register they’ve developed over their career without overstaying any of them. “Corpsebloom Garden” and “Carrion King” deploy the galloping momentum that Khemmis have occasionally used to devastating effect – Hutcherson’s guttural vocal at its most abrasive – while “Grief’s Reverie” and “Tomb of Roses” lean into the melodic, emotionally resonant register where Pendergast’s clean vocal work is at its most affecting. “Gilded Chambers” opens with a burst of Coleman drumwork that may briefly disorient listeners expecting the band’s more measured pacing, and the decision to keep that intro exactly as Coleman conceived it in pre-production – Hutcherson’s reported response: “Don’t fucking change anything” – is the right one. The record’s cover art, an esoteric oil painting by Christopher Remmers, marks a departure from Sam Turner’s barbarian iconography that had defined previous releases, and fits the album’s more explicitly ceremonial register. It is, as Hutcherson puts it, “celebrating the capital H, capital M of Heavy Metal.”

That phrase sounds like a boast. In context, it reads as something more earned. Khemmis have not made a record about heavy metal’s power in the abstract – they have made a record that enacts it, structurally, lyrically, and sonically. The ritual opens with an invocation, descends into confrontation, and closes, presumably, in benediction. That arc is not triumphalism. It is catharsis in the actual sense of the word – something worked through rather than around. “The memory cries at the door / Longing just to be whole” is where “Beneath the Scythe” leaves you, and where the record’s journey begins in earnest. Eleven years in, Khemmis have learned that the most honest thing heavy music can do is refuse to resolve too easily. Khemmis does not resolve too easily. It earns it.

Khemmis’ self-titled album comes out June 12th, 2026, on Nuclear Blast.

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Khemmis Tour Dates:

06/19 – Vancouver, BC @Rickshaw Theater ^
06/20 – Seattle, WA @ Substation ^
06/21 – Portland, OR @ Aladdin Theater ^
06/23 – Sacramento, CA @ Starlet Room ^
06/24 – Berkeley, CA @ Cornerstone ^
06/25 – Santa Cruz, CA @ Felton Music Hall ^
06/26 – Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room ^
06/27 – San Diego, CA @ Brick By Brick ^
06/28 – Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy & Harriet’s ^
06/30 – Phoenix, AZ @ Nile Theater ^
07/01 – Cottonwood, AZ @ Queen B ^
07/02 – Albuquerque, NM @ Sister ^
08/27 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall %
08/28 – Louisville, KY @ Portal %
08/29 – Atlanta, GA @ Garden Club %
08/30 – Asheville, NC @ Eulogy %
08/31 – Columbia, SC @ New Brookland Tavern %
09/02 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts %
09/03 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere %
09/05 – Baltimore, MD @ Labor Daze %
09/08 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups %
09/09 – Detroit, MI @ Sanctuary %
09/10 – Indianapolis, IN @ Black Circle %

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