It’s hard not to get caught up in the cadence of riffs and drum patterns on Immutable ★★★★☆

The band members of Meshuggah don’t walk into the rehearsal room on Saturday morning to think about how they can do something completely different. Fortunately not, you think at their ninth album immutable† There is so much powerful music to be drawn from their unique idiom that you hope they stick around for a few more decades.

Meshuggah, founded in 1987, has created a genre of its own and built a cult following from it. The Swedes make stripped but bunker-hard metal, in which technique and virtuosity are preferred over outward show or theatrical, whether or not morbid fringe matters. Guitar solos or catchy rock choruses don’t participate: Meshuggah especially worships the rhythm, with religious conviction.

Just like the American band Tool, for example, Meshuggah shows improbable time signatures and tempo changes, in a mighty interplay between guitars, bass and drums. Then you should be warned as a critical metal listener and ask yourself: who are they making so complicated for? Is a rarely seen time signature a way to show how clever they can make music, or is there more to this?

So that last one. In the clashing riffs and drum patterns in the tracks Phantoms† Ligature Marks and the thundering Armies of the Preposterous you can hear why Thomas Haake is often called one of the best drummers on earth, but after five bars you forget that and you are dragged into that cadence, which becomes more and more of a trance during the more than an hour long album. An earthy and rough rhythm almost without decoration, as if the metal has been broken down and rebuilt from the bare building blocks. But with an irresistible groove.

Because with all the angularity and the roaring evil man vocals of Jens Kidman, you hear in immutable mainly round shapes and therefore rather flexible music that lifts you up and shakes you up. Such strong persuasiveness and integrity in loud music never becomes jaded or old-fashioned.