The band has laid down some absolutely brilliant work here. Abigail Williams has crafted an album that is filled with dark aggression, yet carries this force through a vast landscape of grim atmospherics and brilliant songwriting. They manage to fill the album with a plethora of riffs and lay them on top of drums that speed up and slow down at just the perfect moments to get the listener engaged and keen to hear more. Ken Sorceron has the mid-range snarl befitting of a black-metal vocalist, but he keeps things fascinating with the occasional spurt of deeper growls.

Neither does the album stay in any sort of rut, as there are plenty of moments when the atmosphere is broken by energetic bursts like the head banging chug in the middle of Infinite Fields of Mind. In many ways the album reminds me of Agalloch’s newer material, and at other times of more purely atmospheric black-metal bands (some parts really made me reckon of Leviathan, maybe it was the effects surrounding the vocals). Becoming contains a wealth of moods both grim and triumphant, making an album filled with dramatic depth and a fantastic listen from start to end. I’d say it was both a fantastic way to start 2012 and the perfect soundtrack for the winter of any year.