It seems crazy to me that a band like Orthodox has completely passed me by. They have been around for nearly 15 years and are 4 albums deep into their career, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard them. Talk about a shock to the system. A Door Left Open is one of the biggest revelations to come across my ears in quite some time.
This is a nasty mindfuck of a record that wants you to feel every single part of it, while challenging you to turn it off. It’s an album that you experience rather than just listen to and it demands your full attention.
Can You Save Me? comes stampeding through your speakers like a herd of pissed off elephants, all down tuned stomp & smash. It’s a dizzying way to start the album that instantly throws the listener for a loop. Followed up by the grotesque drive by of a track that is the minute long Body Chalk, you barely have a chance to catch your breath as Orthodox keeps raining the heavy blows down on you.
Blend in with the Weak sounds like someone injected Hatebreed with the venom stuff that they created Bane with. A raging, muscular beatdown of a track that seethes with an unrestrained rage that will ignite a thousand mosh pits around the globe. Mosh calls, razorwire riffs and the kind of vocals that would scare an exorcist, its one of the albums many highlights.
Godless Grace has a thrashy energy to it that picks up the pace for a solid 3 minute blast of pure bug eyed insanity. Its an unrelenting nightmare that wants you to revel in its darkness. Sacred Place is so bleak and so hopeless that it becomes more skin crawlingly uncomfortable as it goes along. A truly harrowing and desperate sounding 3 minutes that will stick with you long after the album is done.
Searching for a Pulse throws some glitchy electronics into it’s frenzied beatdowns, adding another flavour to the fury. Commit to Consequence sounds like someone got Zakk Wylde on a King 810 track. Make of that what you will…It shifts, twists and changes styles more times than a confused influencer hopping between trends.
Closing track Will You Hate Me? sends the album out in much the same way the album started in a brutal, dark fashion. Kicking off with a whirlwind of riffs and drums, before moprhing into a more subdued ambient direction with haunting spoken word passages as the album starts to fade out. Its keeps the haunting keys layered under a hail of stabbing guitars and gutteral screams, and like that the album ends.
A Door Left Open is an astonishing record. Completely uncompromising, deranged, visceral and relentlessly bleak to an uncomfrotable degree. This is the sound of heavy music in 2025. Albums like this get under your skin, they burrow, they fester and they never want to leave, but when they are this good, you’ll be hard pressed to want to let go once you’re in it’s clutches. Orthodox might want to consider changing their name though, because nothing they do is conventional by any stretch of the imagination and they are all the better off for it.
A Door Left Open is out on June 6th via Century Media for more information click here
