HURACÁN’s “2025”: The Geometry of Ruin and Sonic Prophecies

Huracán have always carried a certain volcanic gravity with them. From Ghent’s underground stages to festival lineups where they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with heavyweights, the Belgian quartet forged a sound that refuses to sit still, neither in the comfortable haze of stoner grooves, nor in the sprawling monumentality of post-metal.

Their latest EP, “2025” (Dunk! Records), feels less like a collection of songs and more like an unrelenting confrontation with a world unraveling. It’s compact, loud, furious, and strangely liberating, a soundtrack to both the downfall and the dance that follows it.

Produced by Chiaran Verheyden (Hippotraktor, Psychonaut, Bear), the four tracks here are weapons sharpened on the whetstone of sludge, hardcore, and progressive instincts. What Huracán deliver is not escapism; it’s a mirror turned directly toward the wreckage of the now.

The EP kicks the door open with ‘Slaves’, a vortex of guitar riffs that don’t just grab you, they fling you headfirst into Huracán’s sonic maelstrom. The opening seconds are pure ignition: heavy, propulsive, alive. The vocals, channeling a Troy Sanders-esque growl, carry both the authority of Mastodon and the grime of sludge. What emerges is not mimicry, but a voice steeped in urgency and contradiction, rage and compassion, hatred and self-preservation.

Breakdowns punctuate the flow like punches to the chest, flashes of hardcore velocity keeping the body in constant motion. The chorus, short but dangerously catchy, is the real hook: a chant-like eruption that instantly etches itself into memory. ‘Slaves’ doesn’t just introduce the EP, it sets its manifesto: a heavy-metal hymn of resistance, desperate and unrelenting.

‘Shapes’ doesn’t lower the intensity so much as it refracts it, shifting the attack into more fluid, winding forms. The tempo sways between drive and restraint, pulling the listener deeper into this sludge / post-metal odyssey. Vocally, there’s a different trajectory, less snarling, more elevated, as though the voice itself is clawing upward through collapse, gasping yet triumphant.

Moments of epic resonance appear like shafts of light cutting through thick smoke. The guitars lean into progressive leanings without ever abandoning the visceral core. By its final stretch, ‘Shapes’ unfurls into something cathartic, both furious and strangely redemptive. If ‘Slaves’ is the scream of enslavement, ‘Shapes’ is the struggle to bend those chains into something new.

If the first two tracks framed the fight against an oppressive outside world, ‘Sinners’ feels far more intimate, anger turned inward, rebellion aimed at the self. The song pulses with a restless urgency, its rhythm section dragging the listener into a storm that never truly calms, only shifts direction.

There are moments where the aggression seems to ebb, only to return sharper, more deliberate. This back-and-forth creates a sensation of being trapped inside one’s own machinery of guilt, defiance, and survival. It’s a song about collision: between the personal and the collective, between fury and confession. Huracán don’t offer resolution here, only the raw honesty of conflict.

The EP’s closer, ‘Shadows’, is arguably the most striking moment on “2025”. Stripped of excess, it thrives on precision, guitars, bass, and drums locked in tension like wires stretched to breaking point. Clean vocals drift in like a cool gust, a rare reprieve that makes the heaviness surrounding them hit even harder.

There’s a subtle infusion of the unexpected: guitar riffs with an almost oriental inflection, synth flourishes buried deep in the mix. They surface briefly, like ghostly apparitions in the volcanic roar, and vanish just as quickly, haunting, mysterious, unforgettable. ‘Shadows’ doesn’t close the EP as much as it leaves it suspended, unfinished, like a story deliberately cut mid-sentence.

Taken as a whole, “2025” plays out like four dark chapters in a fractured chronicle of our times. The themes of slavery, shapes of resistance, sin, and shadows sketch a landscape of collapse, an era in distortion, a world circling back into its own corrupted past. Huracán don’t try to heal or escape this reality; instead, they wrestle with it, taunt it, roar back at it.

The result is a record that leaves you tense, invigorated, and strangely hopeful. Because in their chaos lies clarity: “2025” is not about the end, but about the fight that refuses to end.