Species

The first album from unconventional Polish power trio Species, To Find Deliverance, leveled one with its rare blend of technical thrash prowess and unorthodox but highly inspired songwriting, enough to make 20 Buck Spin’s best of 2022 album list. Out of that list a collaboration was born and now Species make their 20 Buck Spin debut with second album Changelings.

A step up in every regard, Changelings is astonishing in its accomplished precision and how much it manages to achieve within the scope of individual tracks and as a cohesive whole. The album features an overload of angular guitar warfare, traditional Euro-thrash aggression with a modern resonance, rhythmic percussive seizures, and intricate basslines that make their intention deeply felt, not just following the guitar but dialoguing with it in a way that offers a second melodic brain to the album. In combination these elements thread seamlessly to give Changelings its colorful and uncanny vision, as if John Carpenter had co-produced Rust In Peace behind the iron curtain. It’s bristling with sci-fi paranoia, alien terror and a hint of Cold War menace. The early convergence of thrash metal with death metal is also unmistakably present in the shape-shifting sound of Species.

While there’s more than enough primitive and traditional thrash bands to go around, Species embraces the genre’s lesser-travelled road of forward-thinking virtuosity and inventive experimentation, showing there’s still plenty of fertile ground to seed new musical territory. Nowhere is it more apparent than on 10-minute album closer “Biological Masterpiece”, where Species displays all its weapons; hyperspeed assaults, dystopian lulls and instrumental mastery, in a climatic saga beyond space and time. Changelings is that rare album nowadays that still has the ability to surprise in the most triumphant and euphoric way possible.