Shadow of Intent – Imperium Delirium

Some albums come out, you listen to them for a few days, play them over and over, and then they slowly get buried under everything else you listen to. And then there are albums that stay somewhere in the back of your mind, even after months have passed. *Imperium Delirium* belongs to the second category for me.

It's been a while since the album came out. Normally, you could look at a review this late and say, “Well, I'm too late,” and move on. But I didn't want to do that with *Imperium Delirium*. I've been following Shadow of Intent for quite some time, and this album found a special place for me from the very first listen.

Shadow of Intent's music isn't really something you put on in the background while doing something else. There is so much going on in their songs that sometimes you need to listen to the same track several times to really take everything in.

*Imperium Delirium* is exactly that kind of album.

The moment “Prepare to Die” kicks in, it's obvious that this isn't just another deathcore album. The symphonic passages, technical guitars, drums and Ben Duerr's vocals come together to create a seriously massive wall of sound. But the impressive part is that the songs never get completely buried underneath all that intensity.

“Flying the Black Flag” and “Infinity of Horrors” make the album's identity even clearer. Chris Wiseman's guitar work is one of the strongest aspects of the record. The riffs aren't simply there to sound heavy. The melodies and solos woven into them give the songs their own character and make them much easier to remember.

“Mechanical Chaos” lives up to its name. The way the drums and guitars work together here is particularly impressive. If you enjoy the technical side of Shadow of Intent, this track will definitely stand out.

But one of my favorite things about the album is that the band doesn't rely solely on speed and technicality.

“They Murdered Sleep” is a good example of this. The balance between the slower, heavier sections and the explosive parts works really well. “The Facets of Propaganda” brings the atmospheric side of the band further to the front.

And then we get “Feeding the Meatgrinder”.

We weren't exactly expecting a Shadow of Intent track featuring Corpsegrinder to be a bad idea. :) George Fisher's vocals alongside Ben Duerr's create an absolute monster of a combination. More importantly, his appearance doesn't feel like a simple “look, Corpsegrinder is here” gimmick. It genuinely fits the character of the song.

“Vehement Draconian Vengeance” and “Beholding the Sickness of Civilization” continue to showcase the band's melodic side. And that's what makes Shadow of Intent so interesting to me. They take the sheer brutality of deathcore and combine it with melodic death metal, symphonic arrangements and technical guitar work without turning the whole album into nothing more than a collection of breakdowns.

“Apocalypse Canvas” is a bit of a breathing point on the album. As a fully instrumental track, it occupies a different place compared to the rest of the record. I like having tracks like this on an album, especially when the music is this intense. Being able to focus on the music itself for a few minutes without waiting for the next vocal section or breakdown works surprisingly well.

With “No Matter the Cost”, the album enters its final stretch, eventually leading into the seven-minute-plus title track, “Imperium Delirium”. I think making the closing track this long was the right choice. It feels like a proper finale, bringing together many of the elements heard throughout the album.

And when the album ends, one thing remains clear:

Shadow of Intent know exactly what they're doing.

For me, that's the most important thing about *Imperium Delirium*. The album isn't good simply because it's heavy, fast or technical. It's good because the band manages to combine all of those things without losing the identity of the individual songs. When you're working with this many layers, it's very easy for everything to become exhausting noise. Shadow of Intent manage to find a sense of order within that chaos.

Will this album change the mind of someone who doesn't like this kind of music? Probably not. But if you're into deathcore, melodic death metal and symphonic extreme metal, *Imperium Delirium* is definitely not an album you should skip.

And the fact that some time has passed since its release hasn't made it any less valuable to me. If anything, it has had the opposite effect. When I come back to it months later and still find myself nodding along to the same parts, I take that as a pretty good sign that the album did something right.

For me, it was one of the important albums of 2025.

I may be late with the review, but I'm glad I wrote it.

9/10