A Thousand Years Slavery is a Swiss band comprised of five young musicians originating from the Montreux area, in the French speaking part of the country. They perform a hybrid style mixing both Scandinavian death metal and US metalcore. You may know this as deathcore. Let me tell you this; it’s heavy stuff.

What a power! This band breaks down your walls with their great combination of death metal and metalcore. The music is all very up-tempo, with all the instruments coming through quite alright in the mix. There’s space for an occasional breakdown, of which you can find a perfect example in ‘Drastic Oversleep’ (around 2.30 minutes). But of course the band won’t leave you behind without some nice solos every now and then as well. Overall the songs sound so heavy, that it’s sometimes a bit hard too make up whether or not the next song already started. Good example: the end of the second track and the beginning of the third track sound pretty much alike.

Then again, some clean vocal passages that pass by once in a while make the song completely different from its predecessor. It gives the songs some nice twists, in which the band shows it’s also capable of creating some nice melodies. I gotta admit that at first those clean vocals scared me off a bit but after two spins, I already found myself liking them anyway.

The fourth track of this EP, ‘Une Etoile Incandescente’, is a bit of a letdown in the overall atmosphere of A Fury Named Spartan. Where the rest of the EP is heavy as fuck, this song is an interlude with very calm and acoustic music with some whispered vocals. To top it all off, these vocals are in French. Not my thing, and I think it’s a missed opportunity for the band to show some more qualities metal wise. Then again, one might use this moment as a little moment of rest in the highly energetic atmosphere that reigns supreme on the rest of the EP.

If this is something for you, be sure to keep your eyes open for their first full length album, which should be out somewhere by the end of next year. Heavy music with furious grunts!