Album Review: Devouring Famine - A Man Whispering with the Dead

Album Review 

Artist: Devouring Famine

A Man Whispering with the Dead

Release Date: November, 13, 2025

Score 8/10 

Review by Rick Eaglestone

California's Devouring Famine have been steadily carving out their own putrid corner of the underground black metal scene, and with A Man Whispering with the Dead, they've delivered something genuinely unsettling.

From the moment opener "Imploding into the Black Hole" crawls from the speakers, it's abundantly clear that Devouring Famine aren't interested in your comfort. The riffing here is dissonant, angular, and deliberately uncomfortable – it feels like being trapped in a conversation with something that shouldn't be speaking at all. The production sits in that sweet spot where everything is audible but nothing is clean, giving the whole affair a suffocating, claustrophobic quality that perfectly serves the material.

The vocals throughout are absolutely venomous. Rather than relying on the standard black metal shriek, there's a croaking, rasping quality to the delivery that genuinely sounds like something dredged up from a crypt.

"Eternal Library of the Damned"showcases the band at their most atmospheric, with guitars that ring out like funeral bells being struck underwater. The bass work here is particularly noteworthy, providing a rumbling foundation that adds genuine depth to the sound. Too often in extreme metal, the bass is either inaudible or simply doubling the guitars, but Devouring Famine understand that a prominent, well-mixed bass can add layers of dread that guitars alone can't achieve.

One of the album's greatest strengths is its refusal to conform to any single black metal subgenre. There are elements of raw black metal, atmospheric black metal, dissonant black metal, and even hints of death-doom, but Devouring Famine blend these influences seamlessly rather than awkwardly stitching them together. The result is something that feels genuinely fresh within a genre that can often feel stagnant.

The album's pacing is absolutely spot-on. In an era where too many bands overstuff their releases or fall back on the "let's make everything forty minutes because that's an album length" approach, Devouring Famine have crafted something that feels exactly as long as it needs to be. There's no filler here, no tracks that make you want to hit skip. Every moment serves the album's overarching atmosphere and vision.

In terms of where this sits in Devouring Famine's discography, A Man Whispering with the Dead feels like a band hitting their stride. There's a confidence to the song writing, a surety to the execution that suggests a band who know exactly what they're about and exactly how to achieve it. This is Devouring Famine at their most focused, their most vicious, their most effective.

 In conclusion, A Man Whispering with the Dead is a triumph of underground black metal. Devouring Famine have created something genuinely bleak and disturbing in equal parts