With Ion, Portal dismantle expectations and reforge their craft into something scalpel-sharp, brilliantly fractured, and unsettlingly lucid. Gone is the murky density that cloaked earlier records like Outre’ and Vexovoid in a fog of dread. In its place is a flayed and glaring intensity, where every jagged tremolo and frenzied drum pattern feels exposed under a clinical, unblinking light. The result is a death metal record that trades suffocation for incision—cutting with precision rather than crushing with weight. Ion is not simply another Portal record. It is a deliberate mutation—a cleansing fire that burns away the murk to reveal the band’s core: erratic, angular, and utterly committed to the art of sonic disfigurement. It is less a death metal album than a transmission from a collapsing dimension, encoded in frequencies that sear the brain and contort the soul. In this unrelenting, labyrinthine landscape, Portal have never sounded more alive.