Heart Through Sacrifice – Heart Through Sacrifice (Review)

Prog metal band Heart Through Sacrifice released a digital version of their debut work on August the 29th. The band initially intended to only release the album as physical CD digipaks, to be sold at gigs. Considering the high rate of selling and the fact that gigs started to be a sort of mirage during the pandemic, the band opened to release it broadly, adding new artwork and include all instrumental versions.

The self titles album Heart Through Sacrifice is a fantasy and a deep story, as you can guess from the album cover. Looking at that you can picture immediately that this album tells a story, well done on that.

The album has 12 tracks (10, considering the spoken prologue and epilogue) and there is always a sort of double title, guiding the listener through the concept. Blood stained stone / The boy starts the album with intense but melodic vocals. That's the aspect I liked the most of the band: the music of Heart Through Sacrifice is always heavy and technical, and the female vocals on top of that create a good contrast. I'm always picky with singers (as I consider myself a singer too) but all the vocals are spot on, on this album, technical and never lazy.

Eyes of gold / The warrior is filled with good riffing and double bass drum work. The catchier song on the album (at least for me) is Where there was grace / The fallen prey, a little more straightforward than the others, especially in the first part of the song while Vengeance and fury / Decimate starts with great drumming and it's angry as the title suggests. To Truly Honour Them / Fire is the "ballad" of the album. You noticed "ballad" in brackets because the band always plays with strange drums tempo and strange riff, so it's definitely not a canonical one. 

Salvation through sacrifice is the closing track of the album with lots of different atmospheres and also the longest one and the only one with a title without an /, but the album ends officially after the spoken Epilogue. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, on the Spotify link below you can listen to all the songs in their instrumental version, if you want to enjoy and hear more details of the band playing without the vocals. The songs make absolute sense even this way. Give it a try on the player below.

Top tracks: Born from sin / the beast, Vengeance and fury / Decimate, To Truly Honour Them / Fire. 

You can follow the band here:
https://www.facebook.com/heartthroughsacrifice
https://open.spotify.com/artist/70SIMu3gpEJamLcsMKycaU?si=3HJxy9IuRk20OGs_2nbCHg&dl_branch=1
https://soundcloud.com/user-586214644/tracks
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCedjSEmySDX-7WePYJsJcwQ
https://www.instagram.com/heartthroughsacrifice/