Review: Oppression - No Safe Place (2025)

Band: Oppression
Album: No Safe Place
Genre: Melodic Black Metal
Country: France
Label: Folter Records
Released: December 12, 2025

Introduction:

What happens when you blend two good friends and some well known black metal veterans from the French black metal bands of Lifestream and Unholy Blades? You get the annihilation of Oppression's debut album No Safe Place ripping your soul apart, that's what you get!

From beginning to end, No Safe Place exhilarates the listener through different landscapes of blistering blast beats, shredding riffs, and a fair amount of mid paced melodic riffs piercing one's soul through the depths of French melodic black metal sometimes bordering with blackened thrash metal riffing.

No Safe Place

The title track is a two minute instrumental opus eerily opening with a gentle guitar riff that explodes into a gigantic sound of blast beats and shreds transiting with the threatening words of "THERE'S NO SAFE PLACE FOR YOU!!!" Segueing to "Attrition", which uses different vocal techniques to give the song its own identity amongst some of the mid pace shredding, drum patterns, and outstanding guitar solos. Normally I like the album first track openers, however in this case both "No Safe Place" and "Attrition" get my vote for first two track album openers.

"Homeland's Fury", "Psalm for the Fallen", "Maria Rosenthal", "End Humanism", and "The Call of the Night" showcase the pure melodic black metal that this album is labeled under hosting a myriad of ferocious and mid paced riffs that mirror the great Swedish melodic black metal bands, such as Dissection, Sacramentum, and Lord Belial to name a few.

Another interesting facet to this album is that it seems to separate itself with another instrumental "Journey Beyond Consciousness", which begins as a hypnotic track with some mid pace riffing about. Of course Oppression doesn't like to keep their music slow, it bangs into another explosion of fast paced riffing and hammering drums that tend to beat your brain beyond consciousness.

Another personal favorite track of mine, "The Call of the Night" is about a six minute epic journey that begins slow and perfectly shift tempos from slow to mid to fast paced melodies keeping with time and torturing the listener making them wonder will the song ever climax into something bigger. G.S.V. does wonderful vocal ranges here with singing and spewing his unforgiving chanting here married with operatic melodies in the back to give it a more engaging atmosphere.

Finally we end with the album closer, "Nice Death Matters" at breakneck speed giving that good old blackened thrash feeling to the listener their ears have been tortured in a good way and not to ever forget them!

Conclusion:

No Safe Place is a banger of a debut with no weak tracks at all. It will be interesting to see how this band evolves and what they become in the future. I definitely recommend this album to melodic black metal enthusiasts that love their black metal to have atmosphere and feeling.

BMZ Rating: 8 of 10

Support Oppression here: https://folterrecords.bandcamp.com/album/no-safe-place