Hibria

Hibria, the band's self-titled fifth album, arrived in 2015 — in Japan from King Records as KICP-1736 on 22 July, and elsewhere from Test Your Metal Records on 7 August. A self-titled record is usually either a debut or a restart; this is the second kind, an attempt to strip the band's sound back to bare metal as its twentieth year approached. The song titles say it most clearly. "Pain", "Abyss", "Life", "Ghosts", "Legacy", "Ashamed", "Church", "Fame", "Words" — nearly all of them single words. The songs are organised the same way: the long developments and elaborate key changes of the earlier records recede, and riff and vocal are connected by the shortest available route. "Tightrope" holds tension, "Church" sits low and heavy, and the late "Words" opens out — each song has a clear job. Iuri Sanson spends less time demonstrating the top of his range and more carrying words in the middle of it. A band known for technique put technique back where it belongs, as a means rather than an end. The Japanese edition, KICP-1736, runs to twelve tracks with two bonus additions, one of them a cover of Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke". A live recording made in Porto Alegre that November fed the following year's twentieth-anniversary release XX.