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• “The musicians in Merrimack are musical terrorists, keying in on your secret fears and desires to unlock the code of existence. Like a doorway to another dimension, this Parisian cell unleashes its evil with no responsibility to what might exit from the trapdoor they open. This is the soundtrack to my death” – Metal Edge

• “Offers all the surface ingredients of a hollow-horned masterpiece. In fact, the 10-song offering smacks of unholy awesomeness on expectancy alone...meshes intricate song structure and multi textured layers of sound with a cold, communicable bitterness few modern-day BM hordes have the ability to convincingly convey” – Decibel [8/10 rating]

• “By far the most accomplished and self-actualised album for the Gallic quintet: Grey Rigorism possesses all of the genre’s proper fury with just enough magic ‘n’ mysticism to satisfy the ‘religious’ nuts amongst the underground” – Zero Tolerance

• “Merrimack are more than willing to scare you with their morose, experimental drippings…Certainly not for the faint of heart, Grey Rigorism is a powerful building block for Merrimack’s already deservedly well-respected career” – McKeesport Daily News

• “Merrimack write damn good songs, adding creativity and an almost classical sense of compositional structure without straying from the conventions of guitar-bass-drums black metal… Grey Rigorism is, from start to finish, an impassive slab of brutal, flaying, utterly heavy blackened torment. The genius of Merrimack is that their fury is even more potent, and their impact greater, for having an iron-fisted control over their swirling chaos” – Blabbermouth.net [8/10 rating]

• “Frenzied yet catchy” – Blistering.com

• “Unsettling…It’s strange to hear black metal so grown up” – Invisible Oranges webzine

• “Slithering like a deadly snake through the grass, set to kill, their music creeps into your skull and does its damage” – Metal-Exiles.com

• “Just as good if not better than Of Entropy and Life Denial…cold, fast, unrelenting black metal” – Primitive Ways webzine

• “A very malevolent atmosphere” – Infernalmasquerade.com

• “All the great elements of black metal are melded into one bleak and disturbing force, with the mission of making the sickest music one band can create” – Absolute Zero Media webzine

A pestilent air rises from the underground, as it should. For however much black metal continues to be co-opted, commercialized, and crassly made into a (marketable) parody of itself, there exist true aesthetic terrorists with such fanatic ideology and frightening vision to keep the genre “grounded” – in the dirt, in the grime, of the soul.
MERRIMACK is one such band. Having made a cult name for themselves with 2001’s Horns Defeat Thorns demo and 2002’s Ashes of Purification debut album, this French horde have provocatively pursued their (ir)religious inspiration for 15 years, and have fully blossomed under the watchful eye of THE MORIBUND RECORDS. Those first fruits of evil? MERRIMACK’s Of Entropy and Life Denial, a real black metal record made with real ideology and vision, and one that bespoke a totality of depth ‘n’ depravity. The second fruit? Grey Rigorism, the swaggering, supremely confident follow-up that shows this French fivesome flexing muscles of creativity and depravity precious few can fathom, a mesmerizing miasma that’s elusively professionalism in an underground grown too lazy. And yet again, not just the underground will witness this malign muse.
Beginning foul life in 1994, MERRIMACK soon recorded their first demo, Act I, the following year. After some lineup shifts and live gigs, the band recorded a split demo with HIRILORN in 1998, and it was released by legendary underground label Drakkar Productions (Mutiilation, GRAND BELIAL’S KEY, Tsjuder, Warloghe). Although MERRIMACK’s sound was more atmospherically based during these years, both demos brought the band considerable attention.
But it was the aforementioned Horns Defeat Thorns demo where MERRIMACK’s scathing style truly began to blossom (these three demos have been compiled and released on CD by MORIBUND as Obsecrations to the Horned, in 2004). That scathing, filthy, and flaying style further blossomed a year later, in 2002, with MERRIMACK’s debut album, Ashes of Purification, which would soon sell out of its first pressing and go on to be considered a modern black metal classic. Also in 2002, MERRIMACK shed their first blood for MORIBUND through a limited-edition (and soon sold-out) 7” with Finnish filth horde (and fellow MORIBUND terrorists) SARGEIST. More gigs followed, alongside fellow terrorists as HORNA, Krieg, Antaeus, Celestia, Temple Of Baal, Darvulia, and many others.
Whereas Of Entropy and Life Denial located a delicate balance between towering might and contorting dexterity, here on Grey Rigorism MERRIMACK stretch out their compositional prowess toward more epic corridors – pitch-black corridors that wind and wend, myriad permutations of sin and suffering around each corner, the band both vessel and orator. Once again recorded in the boomy ‘n’ roomy caverns of Necromorbus Studio (Watain, Funeral Mist), MERRIMACK also once again balance malicious underground spirit and wickedly simmered maturity, as Grey Rigorism is a testament to true underground spirit being suffused with startling professionalism. Hellfire and focus – damnation awaits.