One of the most exciting new hordes BLOOD HARVEST has come across in recent years, UNIVERSALLY ESTRANGED shocked and awed last year with their debut album, Reared Up in Spectral Predation. Widely acclaimed and blowing most minds who heard it, the mysterious one-man entity created sci-fi-drenched death metal of a most malign and mesmerizing order…and now he returns, little more than a year later, with an even more intimidating record.

Tellingly titled Dimension of Deviant Clusters, UNIVERSALLY ESTRANGED’s second album lays forth an equally psychedelic landscape perhaps less Technicolor than its predecessor but arguably one more focused and fearless. For sure, the dazzling/disorienting bleeps ‘n’ bloops hinted at on the first album go full tilt here, singeing the synapses while tighter and more coiled song constructions surge forward with crushing clarity, all before going in impossibly angular directions which feel more like a fever dream rather than (un)conventional death metal. Dimension of Deviant Clusters is thus an album of stark contrasts: on one hand, some of UNIVERSALLY ESTRANGED’s biggest (or, at least, most engaging) hooks, brought forth by seamless flow and exceptionally tight execution; on the other hand, a total MINDFUCK where riffs implode, backwards, and lazers shoot from every direction and tempos just tumble where they may. But, lest this all sound like a mess on paper, the mainman makes it all work lysergically, alchemically well, slam and skronk coming together and unveiling infinitely more possibilities for cosmonauts smitten with that first full-length. And if this is your first trip with UNIVERSALLY ENSTRANGED? Prepare to drop out, and drop in…deep, deep, deeper.

Science fiction becomes reality, and it’s bonkers to behold. Death metal’s DNA gets mangled once again, emerging more hideous and heightened than before, with UNIVERSALLY ESTRANGED’s Dimension of Deviant Clusters.