After eight long years brewing in the darkness in the arctic circle city of Rovaniemi, Finland, Serotonin Syndrome emerge with a dark and evocative album that underlines the fragile beauty of hopelessness. Utilising elements of black, doom and alternative post-metal, the Finnish quintet put forward their bleak observations of the world around them into a soul crushing and though provoking album, Seed Of Mankind channels melancholy, hopelessness, anger, frustration and plain suffering and every nuance in between. With that in mind every song feels like it could be the soundtrack to the apocalyptic demise of the world, in a time where humanity could have everything they ever needed.
The overarching theme of the album is something that many of us have noticed over the last decade or more, humanity’s incompetence in prioritising the needs of our home, Earth. As exhaust fumes congregate in our atmosphere, Serotonin Syndrome make a strong case that with vast resources and possibilities that we have in our hands, we continue to suffocate ourselves and our environment. With that knowledge, and that it took three years of pain and suffering for the band to create, Seed Of Mankind is an incredibly intense and visceral listen. In many ways, the pain, frustration and suffering that has been poured is in many ways reflective of the band’s very essence. While still playing to their beautifully melancholic and sombre strengths, Serotonin Syndrome’s brand of post-metal has gotten a lot heavier, especially when compared to the band’s debut 2015 album Sarajas there is an incredible shift in sound and tone. With the intense, cold atmospheres of black metal co-inhabiting the space with gigantic doom riffs it is certainly a departure from their early Katatonia influenced days.
The visceral anger of the album can be felt mainly in songs like ‘Dot Marks The Spot’ and ‘The Pitiful One’ as crushing blacked, sludgy doom takes centre stage. The reverberations of their everlasting echoes of anger are heard loud and clear as that rage also manifests across the rest of the album via a form of sonic osmosis. Where as the rest of the album ‘Among Others’, ‘The End’ and title track ‘Seed Of Mankind’ give way to long atmospheric instrumentals, where soaring reverberated and modulated melodies stir a plethora of emotions within you. With the finality and destruction of the world intertwined with how we can slowly see it disintegrating before us, Serotonin Syndrome definitely make you stop and reflect on where you fit in this world. It is a situation a lot of us are familiar and uncomfortable with as environmental anxiety, alongside the horrible uncertainty encased within it, is continuing to peak. This sense of despair manifest itself in an eerie way and with that manifestation it transcends the album in the most paradoxically beautiful yet hideous way. Title track ‘Seed Of Mankind’ is the epitome of this concept, especially as it leads into ‘Dot Marks The Spot’, the songs speak to a primal fear and a modern anxiety with catastrophically brutal riffing juxtaposed with delicate atmospheric sections.
It is safe to say that Seed Of Mankind is an unholy unleashing of eight years of anger and turmoil, strife and grief, despair and hopelessness. An utterly ruthless observation at the state of the world through a barrage of brutal riffs and soul stirring melodies. As the world continues to descend into chaos, are Serotonin Syndrome showing us a taste of what is to come? Only time can answer that question, so all that is left to do is bask in the hopelessness of this visceral album.