Review: Suffering – Things Seen but Always Hidden

Rick Eaglestone November 16, 2025

Review by Rick Eaglestone

Suffering – Things Seen but Always Hidden

Record Label: Apocalyptic Witchcraft Recordings

Year: 2025

Rating: 8/10

West Midlands Occult Black Metal conjurors Suffering have been lurking in the shadows since 2012, gradually building a reputation for the kind of diabolical, atmosphere-drenched extremity that leaves scars on the psyche. Their 2018 debut 11 announced them as a band uninterested in playing by anyone’s rules, and with the recent Symphonies: Diabolis EP, they have only grown more confident in their malevolent vision. Now, signed to the aptly named Apocalyptic Witchcraft, they’ve unleashed Things Seen But Always Hidden.

Opener ‘The House With The Red Door’ begins its slow, creeping ascent into darkness. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill corpse-painted tremolo worship—though there’s plenty of classic black metal DNA coursing through these veins, a hybrid beast that takes the raw fury of second-wave black metal and drags it through ritualistic doom’s murky depths.

‘Enthralled’ comes at you like a possessed sermon, Sturmgeist Fornicator Insultus’s vocals tearing through the speakers with legitimate venom. But it is what happens around those vocals that truly captivates. Aýdlig’s guitar work shifts between Classic Black Metal tremolo patterns and slower, more deliberate passages that feel like invocations.

‘The Chamber Of Breathtaking Delights’ is anything but delightful in the conventional sense. The title is pure morbid irony, and the track itself is a masterclass in building tension. Malleus’s drumwork here deserves particular mention—there is a ritualistic quality to the patterns, a sense that we’re being led deeper into some forbidden ceremony.

Suffering

‘Consorting With The Devil’ might be the album’s most overtly aggressive moment, a journey into pure malevolence. Inquinatus’s bass is particularly prominent here, adding a layer of low-end menace that makes everything feel heavier, more physical. This is music you feel in your chest as much as you hear with your ears. The way Suffering blends blast-beat fury with crawling doom sections without ever losing momentum is genuinely impressive—lesser bands would make these transitions feel disjointed, but here they flow with the inevitability of dark ritual.

‘What Once Was Shall Be Again And What Is Shall Be No More’, a title that could serve as the album’s thesis statement. This is where Suffering’s vision comes into sharpest focus. The track is a glimpse beyond the veil, a fall through inherited memory and ancient darkness. There are moments here that feel genuinely transcendent in their bleakness.

‘Apocrypha Through The Keyhole’ serves as the album’s advance single, and it’s easy to hear why. It encapsulates everything Suffering does well in a relatively compact package—the Raw Black Metal aggression, the Doomed heaviness, the unsettling atmospherics that make the hair on your neck stand up. But in the context of the full album, it takes on new dimensions, another chapter in this grimoire of spiritual destruction.

The penultimate track, ‘Hell On Earth New Eden’, is driven by what can only be described as ravenous, unholy hunger. There is a desperation to the performance here, a sense that the band is channelling something genuinely uncomfortable. The vocals in particular sound tortured, not in the performative way of so much Extreme Metal, but with genuine anguish. It’s the kind of track that makes you wonder what headspace the band was in when they recorded it.

Closer ‘Behind The Green Door’ brings things to a conclusion that feels less like an ending and more like an invitation to begin again. The album is cyclical in nature—each track seeping into the next, binding them into a cohesive whole that demands to be experienced from start to finish. This isn’t an album you cherry-pick tracks from for your workout playlist. This is an album that requires commitment, that rewards (or perhaps punishes) those willing to submit to its dark vision.

Apocalyptic Witchcraft, the label that signed Suffering, describes the band’s music as “dark, unflinching, and deeply atmospheric,” and on this evidence, that assessment is spot-on. But there’s more to it than that. Things Seen But Always Hidden possesses the power to genuinely affect the listener, to create an experience that lingers long after the final notes have faded.