Fields of Elysium’s In Ancient Contemplation sounds alive in a way most technical death metal records don’t anymore. Not polished-alive either. More like a band sweating through complicated ideas in a cramped room and occasionally losing control of them. The songs speed up, pull back, drift sideways for a while. Sometimes the transitions barely hold together. I like that. Too much modern prog metal sounds sterilized before it even reaches the listener.

Fields of Elysium came out of the late-2000s American tech-death underground, originally based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Their debut, Unraveling Arcane Dynamics from 2009, had a reputation for being almost absurdly technical. Total riff labyrinth stuff. Grindcore bursts, mathy transitions, nonstop velocity. You can hear the influence of bands like Necrophagist and Cryptopsy all over it. At times it honestly sounds psychotic. In a good way.

Then they basically vanished for almost a decade.

That gap matters because In Ancient Contemplation doesn’t sound like a band trying to outplay everybody anymore. It sounds like a band trying to loosen up and actually breathe a little. The chaos is still there, but now it stretches out into jazz fusion passages, ambient sections, weird melodic detours. Warmer low-end. Less clinical production. You can actually feel air moving through the songs.

A lot of that comes from the lineup itself. Andre Lamoreux handles bass, vocals, and synth, and his fretless playing quietly becomes the emotional center of the whole record, constantly pulling against the guitars instead of simply locking into them. Michael Petry’s drumming keeps the songs moving in strange directions without losing momentum, splashing accents around the riffs instead of pinning everything to a rigid grid. Guitarists Daniel Murphy and Quanah Lee build these dense, spiraling arrangements that feel fluid rather than mechanical, with Lee’s vocals sitting somewhere between feral growls and distant ritual chants. The chemistry between all four musicians is what makes the album work. It sounds like a band reacting to each other in real time instead of executing a perfectly mapped-out tech-death blueprint.

The fretless bass is probably my favorite thing here. It keeps the whole record from turning into math homework. Notes slide around underneath the riffs instead of locking perfectly onto them. You can hear the strings rattle during quieter sections if you listen for it. There’s one stretch in “Alligator Mountain” where the bass just kind of hangs underneath the guitars and hums there for a second. Really good moment. Nothing sounds over-edited either.

“The Whip or the Carrot” is the obvious standout. The intro alone rules. The whole track moves like a jazz fusion band trying to play death metal without fully committing to either one. Drums splashing all over the place. Riffs circling back on themselves. Then the saxophone comes in and somehow makes the song feel even heavier. Not cleaner. Heavier. It sounds raw and slightly exhausted, which is exactly why it works.

When this record locks in, it hits something most technical death metal completely misses. Wet amp heat. Cymbals ringing too long. Fingers sliding across strings between riffs. The sense that the musicians are listening to each other instead of executing a blueprint. Messy in places, definitely. But that’s part of why I keep coming back to it.

You can check out In Ancient Contemplation here, or wherever weird progressive tech-death records still get passed around by people who care about this stuff.