The music Nick Koenigs makes as Filthy Huns sounds, roughly, the way you’d expect—grimy and marauding, foreboding and exploratory. On 2014’s brilliant Leopard on My Right, he doubled down on big, ringing guitars and Morricone-esque mood pieces, stretching his reverb-drenched voice across the back of them like chemtrails across a night sky. The songs on Forever Beast are longer and fiercer by comparison. If Leopard was a tense trek through a rainforest, Beast is a long motorcycle drive on a highway at night.
He sets the mood right out of the gate with the sprawling 13-minute opener “True Love,” where a misty blanket of sound is slowly pulled back to make way for broad slashes of guitar, turning what was a meditative mood piece into something close to a rock song before collapsing into a cloud of noise. Koenigs’ voice appears briefly in the middle, weaving ghostlike over the pulsing sounds. “Class War” is a kaleidoscopic head trip, electronics pinwheeling woozily in the background as Koenigs’ voice drifts like an untethered astronaut in space. According to the album notes, Koenig is joined by Aaron Steinburg on “burner synths and tunnel smoke,” both of which make themselves apparent on the title track, great whooshes of sound encircling ripples of electronics. Forever Beast is a moody, masterful head trip, another plunge into the dark galaxy of Filthy Huns.
