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Well, there's a complicated history behind this album, and it's taken a lot of years and twists and turns to get here. Nocturnus was the band started by drummer Mike Browning after he left Morbid Angel back in the '80s, and produced the debut The Key, which is, on the one hand, a groundbreaking album due to its use of keyboards in extreme metal but, on the other hand, isn't that good. Browning used to have a very stilted, staccato style of songwriting which made all his songs sound the same.

Then in 1992 the other members of Nocturnus trademarked the band name and fired Browning from his own band. It was a dick move, but then they released Thresholds, which I thought was way better than The Key, so it kind of evened out. Browning then went on to form After Death, who basically played the same style of Death Metal, but never released an album.

So now we have Nocturnus AD, which is essentially Browning and his revamped lineup reclaiming the Nocturnus name even though they legally can't use it—even with the old Nocturnus broken up since 2002. So, this is really the proper follow-up to The Key by the original songwriter, almost 30 years later.

Fortunately, Browning's songwriting has improved enormously in the last three decades, as this is everything The Key should have been, but wasn't. This is heavy, slightly technical Death Metal with crunching riffs, atonal leads, and the keys adding atmosphere and a horror-movie kind of menace to the whole affair. The songwriting has a lot more variety and flow to it than it did on The Key, and the album remains interesting and visceral all the way through. A solid return from a force long absent from the scene.