Decibel #247 - May 2025

STORY OF ANTHRAX SPIRITWORLD BONDED BY BLOOD GARY HOLT THE IN THE STUDIO

THE DEVIL’S THIRD

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upfront 10 metal muthas Listen all y’all, it’s a Sabottage 12 exclusive:

maryland deathfest 2025 preview Gearing up for the big two-oh

14 low culture For the nightmare shall consume 15 kill screen:

whitechapel Royale pain

16 in the studio:

anthrax

features 18 ancient death Can I borrow a feeling?

32 rwake Friendship is magick

20 guiltless Here there be monsters

34 exclusive:

22 ingrown State of being 24 messa That ’80s show 26 idle heirs A future of violence 28 tribunal Supreme court

a fabulous disaster: from the garage to madison square garden, the hard way excerpt Exodus guitarist Gary Holt shares all the bloody details about the band’s debut album

reviews 38 q&a: spiritworld Main man Stu Folsom isn’t ready to hang up his spurs… yet 42 the decibel

hall of fame Unleashed avoid the Sunlight to craft their unique brand of Viking death metal on Where No Life Dwells

67 lead review Death metal newcomers Ancient Death have a lot to be proud of on debut LP Ego Dissolution 68 album reviews Records from bands in countries that are looking much more appealing, including Amenra, Conan and In the Woods...

80 damage ink Singing the praises

30 serpent rider It’s all Greek to us

The democratic process

Powered Up COVER STORY COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS

BY SHIMON KARMEL

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $34.95. Periodical postage, paid at Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Postmaster send changes of address for Decibel to Red Flag Media, P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. © 2025 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

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May 2025 [T247] PUBLISHER

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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If you’re reading this right now—and you’re not copy editor Andrew Bonazelli translating it into something resembling English, or art director Mike Wohlberg trying to think of what art best represents my drivel, or one of our masochistic digital edition subscribers—congrats, you’re not in front of a fucking screen! You have no idea how envious I am. To quote my teenage lodestar Henry Rollins, “I wanna pull it out!”

Whether working, being entertained or somehow attempting to multitask between the two (I’m currently typing this while making my way through approximately 65 hours’ worth of Super Bowl LIX reaction videos), our time away from electronic devices grows shorter each day.

For those of you who spend a significant amount of that period being terminally online, the steady stream of horror that social media has injected into your eyeballs for the better part of this year likely isn’t improving your life. Abandoning the doomscroll in favor of our scrolls of doom (and death, black, and even sometimes hardcore) hopefully provides some temporary relief from the alerts and updates that constantly threaten to derail what’s left of your sanity.

So, please enjoy the words that follow with as little interruption as you can manage. We are here for you. Thank you for continuing to be there for us.

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Online DECIBEL WEB EDITOR

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13 provinces (which I’m guessing would be turned into states?) nation into the U.S., it would be a death knell to the Republican vote. Maybe expedite turning the frogs gay, too.

You’re the guitarist of longtime Decibel faves Wake, but Wake isn’t really a full-time endeavor, is it? What do you do for a living in between tours and recordings?

Rob LaChance Calgary, Alberta

So, uh, first, apologies on behalf of the part of America that still gives a shit. As a Canadian, what is your reaction to the current American presidential administration’s bizarre insistence that Canada should be annexed by the U.S.?

No apology needed! Nothing’s shocking when it comes to American political rhetoric, and I try my best to not pay mind to the current political circus that’s happening there. Our circle of friends and fans in the U.S. are mainly of the “give a shit” camp, so we don’t hold the unfortunate turn of administration against them. I mean, if he was to annex our 40 million-plus super-liberal + less religious +

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Wake is something that we do to escape the monotony of real life, and I don’t think we’d enjoy it as much as we do if it was a “full-time” thing. I’m a commercial electrician for a company based out of Calgary. Trades were something I never thought I’d end up doing for a career, but the education and lifestyle worked well with our touring and recording schedules. I enjoy what I do and the freedom that comes with it. I’m employed by a company that is chill about vacation time and band stuff, so it works out well.

I’ve found that the people with the strongest opinions against this kind of thing don’t play music, and the ones that do, play in the most musically stale bands. I do believe a little gatekeeping is important for weeding out the dweebs, but cross-pollinating metal subgenres keeps things interesting not only for the people making the music, but for the listener as well.

The ‘laws’ of metal need to be broken.

I’ve found that the people with the strongest opinions against this kind of thing don’t play music, and the ones that do, play in the most musically stale bands.

Deafheaven are on the cover of this issue. As someone who performs in a band with black metal influences, but isn’t explicitly black metal, can you explain to Deathlord of Abominable Farts in Basement Apocalypse and his trve kvlt pals that it is, in fact, good for bands to do this?

I prefer when metal bands take chances and make unconventional albums—Infinite Granite was one of those albums.

That rules that they’re on the cover, and I’m all for bands breaking genre constructs and taking chances. The “laws” of metal need to be broken.

Gorguts truly deserves it. Legendary band that should have won for Colored Sands. The fact they didn’t is beyond me. Luc Lemay all day!

Who brings home a Juno Award first: You guys or Gorguts?

ChuckBB.com / Instagram: @chuckbb_art

NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month?

Well, here are the records that we spun most while watching 77,302,580 people fuck around and find out.

Because not all of us were spawned in the darkest recesses of hell

This Month’s Mutha: Maria Cecilia Irarragor Mutha of Carolina Pérez Arango of Castrator

Tell us a little about yourself.

I am from Medellin, Colombia, I have six sisters and two brothers, I’m a mother of four and I consider myself a bit reserved. I love music, especially singing, but only when I’m alone. I listen to music all the time. I enjoy collecting things—first, I started with stamps, then coins and bills, as hobbies. I don’t like leaving things unfinished. I also love to laugh and wish for others to be happy and stress-free.

Carolina played with her brother in her first band, Sabottage. How did they get along as kids?

When they were young, they fought all the time, but by the time they reached their teenage years, everything changed and they became inseparable. Her brother became obsessed with the guitar, and she with the drums. They played together in a small room in Medellín with friends, making a huge mess. They spent all day making noise, but that was what they loved.

Later, the band Sabottage was formed when we moved to the United States.

Your daughter has mentioned biking, baking and jewelry-making as some of her interests outside of music. What were some of her other passions growing up?

When Carolina was little, she was very active.

She spent the whole day on roller skates and playing outside. She also loves reading and likes animals. She has many different passions and skills.

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When did Carolina first express an interest in drums? Did you buy her first kit?

She loved music from a very young age. At eight years old, she started guitar lessons, but soon switched to the cello. When she was 14, she asked me to pay for drum lessons, and I did even though we were very poor. I didn’t have the means to buy her a drum set, so she asked us to give it to her as a gift for her quinceañera instead of throwing a party. However, her father insisted on throwing the party even though she didn’t want one, as she was the first girl in the family and it was part of our culture. So, we made the effort, and with the help of one of my sisters who lived in the U.S., we raised the funds to buy her what would make her happy—her drums. A year later, we emigrated to the United States, where the transition was very tough.

Carolina and her brother joined the high school band and they became a sensation.

Do you share any of her musical tastes?

Yes, many! Classical music, salsa, boleros, music from the ’70s and ’80s. Carolina has always loved music in general, not just metal.

What do you think about the name of Carolina’s band?

The name is a bit unusual; it always makes me laugh and scares me at the same time.

But metal bands are known for using these kinds of names, aren’t they? I will never get it!

—ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Ancient Death, Ego Dissolution  Rwake, The Return of Magik  Dax Riggs, We Sing of Only Blood or Love  Deafheaven, Lonely People with Power  Paradise Lost, In Requiem ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Subhumans, The Day the Country Died  Dead Kennedys, In God We Trust, Inc.  Sepultura, Chaos A.D.  Crass, Best Before 1984  Discharge, Never Again ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Deafheaven, Lonely People with Power  Whitechapel, Hymns in Dissonance  Messa, The Spin  Decrepisy, Deific Mourning  Mizmor & Hell, Alluviom ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Whitechapel, Hymns in Dissonance  Pelican, Flickering Resonance  Wrath of Logarius, Crown of Mortis  Mother of Graves, The Periapt of Absence  Hilsfar, Flames on the Moonsea

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Thom Wasluck : P LA NNING FOR B U RIA L  Swervedriver, Mezcal Head  Mamaleek, Vida Blue  Ex-Easter Island Head, Norther  Yoo Doo Right, From the Heights of our Pastureland  Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, On the Echoing Green

MARYLAND DEATHFEST

MARYLAND DEATHFEST

T

his Memorial Day weekend, Maryland Deathfest will host its 20th edition,

where around 4,000 people each day will descend on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor for America’s extreme metal spring break. Reaching 20 events is no small feat in the notoriously fickle world of live music. “Sometimes we have to stop and wonder how we made it this far,” says Ryan Taylor, who co-founded MDF with Evan Harting in 2003. “We’ve grown and evolved naturally, but there’s always been one constant: Our format has never changed; people have embraced it.” ¶ MDF will repeat the same venue format as last year, with two outdoor stages at Market Place and Power Plant, as well as indoor performances at Baltimore Soundstage, Angel’s Rock Bar and the club formerly known as Rams Head Live, which will return unchanged, but rebranded with a new, yet-to-be-announced name.

The essential feature of MDF’s longevity is Taylor and Harting’s ability to continually curate interesting lineups anchored by exclusive performances from rare and storied bands. Some of 2025’s headliners include Asphyx, Dark Funeral, Witchcraft, Nile and Triptykon, who will perform one set of contemporary material and a Celtic Frost set.

“As long as we keep putting out lineups that people are interested in, we’ll continue doing Maryland Deathfest,” Taylor says. To keep things interesting this May, several bands will play classic albums front-to-back, including Decibel Hall of Fame inductees like Obituary’s 1 2 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

Cause of Death, Cynic’s Focus, Paradise Lost’s Draconian Times and Incantation’s Onward to Golgotha.

“There could be bands that people have seen many times in the past. Incantation has been around for a long time, but Onward to Golgotha is one of the greatest death metal albums of all time.”

MDF also offers a slate of less ubiquitous, but no less essential bands, many of them from overseas, such as Spain’s Wormed, Czechia’s Cult of Fire, Japan’s Sigh and Finland’s Havukruunu. “People come into the fest not knowing specific bands,” Taylor says, “but then by the time they leave, they’re fans of bands they’ve

never heard of. [Japanese grindcore quartet] 324 sticks out to me. If people aren’t familiar with them, they need to get their asses into Soundstage for that set.”

After two-plus decades of MDF’s history, you’d think that Taylor and Harting had booked every possible band on their wish list, but no. “King Diamond is a good example,” Taylor notes. “He’s always been welcome, but it’s never worked out with their plans or activity. We were close to having Motörhead booked, but unfortunately, that was right before Lemmy’s health started to go downhill.”

If Lemmy were still alive, odds are he’d admire Taylor and Harting’s persistence. As for what keeps the former working hard to sustain America’s most significant annual metal party, “I’m proud of us just sticking with it and not giving up after the first time or dealing with other challenges. What fuels me is how much this event means to others. This is the weekend of the year for so many people. They make new friends and get engaged here. Families start at MDF. The excitement and the positivity that MDF creates is what keeps me going.”

Historic bands and special sets are nice, but that’s what keeps us going there, too.

—JOSEPH SCHAFER

PHOTO BY JOSH SISK

CELEBRATES THEIR 20TH WITH ANOTHER EXTREME METAL EPIC RAGER

Call of Duty: Warzone [ R AV E N S O F T WA R E / I N F I N I T Y WA R D / ACTIVISION]

PHIL BOZEMAN OF

Seasonally Depressing Philosophy he older I get, the more I start

to notice how everyone who is involved in this whole “scene” (which I’m using as broadly as I can to encompass metal, punk and its various subgenres) has different priorities within their time here and how that often breaks us into various classes. I can hear some of you say “no shit,” and that’s terrific; I’m not entirely confident my word count will allow me to adequately get into this the way it’s thumping around in my head, but here goes.

By priorities, I mean “this” (scene, again) represents art, expression, creativity, politics, things to cum to/in/on, and entertainment, to name a few. I tend to gravitate towards music that represents the first three. I say this because it makes me better than you, which is the opinion a lot of you seem to have when I talk about this kind of thing instead of my cats or a time that I embarrassed myself. But the reality is that I’m at the age where my mortality is a constant tagalong, and I don’t want to waste time on things that don’t enrich my existence. I’ve been trying to use social media less, read more and focus on things that are important to me. Which results in focusing on the things that irritate me and make me less enjoyable to be around.

This will sound like a “kids today” rant, but stop for a moment and go fuck yourself. I see so much of what we’re all involved in moving away from passion or creativity and into the realms of merchandising and distraction until the next shiny thing comes along. I don’t expect people to remain in this subculture their entire lives, but the tourism aspect is becoming a drag. And like any tourist trap, the merchants are out in force, with their wares spread across blankets on the 1 4 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

side of the road. Music, and art overall, becomes commerce, which is a relationship it’s always straddled, but now sits on the proverbial face of.

Everyone is their own small business now, which I talked about in the last column, because that’s the only way to survive unless you’re someone’s trust fund kid or sugar baby.

My (very general) opinion is that a large percentage of today’s music listeners place very little value on what they actually listen to, or to phrase it properly, consume. They care less about the creators than probably ever before, because there is so much product out there that music becomes just that: product. I’m guilty of it as well, to the point where I have to ignore a large amount of music I’ve never heard just so I can digest new music in a meaningful (to me) way.

I’d hope others do as well, without the whole “fear of missing out” thing creeping in like an itchy asshole. But it appears people (mostly) care only if the creators did something they find objectionable and spend their time trying to destroy it rather than moving on. Yes, there’s degrees to it, and some people are pieces of shit who deserve to be punished. But there is an undercurrent of folks who exist merely to jump into the rest of the group and attack things to either mask their own unethical behavior or feel like they belong somewhere.

We have become too detached from one another. I say this as an introvert who despises being around people, but we now look at everyone as though they don’t exist outside of the moment—they’re in our little bubble. And now art is the same way, just a momentary distraction before the next dopamine hit. I don’t have any answers for this other than it’s just how it goes and I’m probably too old for caring.

WHITECHAPEL AND THE ROYALE WITH CHEESE

hough long forgotten in the current landscape, the mega-popular Call of Duty franchise started out in 2003 as a PC-exclusive firstperson shooter set in World War II. Over the 21 mainline titles released so far, the series is now largely unrecognizable to its historical fiction origins. Its FPS roots have remained, but its modern day setting, emphasis on online multiplayer and massive footprint in the e-sports community has made Call of Duty (and its battle royale-focused Warzone) an economic pillar of the industry. It is so incredibly lucrative that it was a focal point in the lawsuit surrounding Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of publisher Activision Blizzard, with competitor Sony fearing console exclusivity of this single title would give their rivals an unfair market advantage.

That’s “b” for billion, baby.

Whitechapel frontman and gaming lifer Phil Bozeman isn’t buying what they’re selling. The vocalist has been manning controllers since the days of the NES, conquering games across platforms and genres all the while, Call of Duty included. But even with the freemium price and a self-described competitive streak, it’s Warzone that led Bozeman to put the Call on hold.

KILL SCREEN 058

DON CURTIS & COREY CLARK It doesn’t matter how good you are; it’s just the flip of a coin.

It’s like gambling in video games: Like,

MOTHER OF GRAVES

‘ALL RIGHT, THIS IS A FREE-FOR-ALL. WHATEVER HAPPENS, HAPPENS.’ Ahead of Whitechapel’s return to form with new album Hymns in Dissonance, our expansive conversation with the deathcore pioneer can be found on the Decibel website covering his decades of digital worship. In this print exclusive excerpt, however, he shares just how this gaming giant missed the mark for him.

You mentioned competitive online gaming [and playing] Call of Duty. Did you fall down the Warzone black hole at any point?

No. I am one of the few—very few. [Battle royales] just became a fad for a while. Every game company was trying to do it. Fortnite came out and that was a huge success, and then Call of Duty followed suit. I did play the Blackout one from [game developer] Treyarch during Black Ops 4, I think. I played Warzone a little bit. Since I was more on the competitive side of everything, I naturally started to hate it because it took precedence over competitive play, like classic Call of Duty. Now, I won’t lie: I had some fun times during Warzone, but I was so into the competitive side and it was just taking away from [public games] and competitive play. Naturally they were going to put more resources into that because

that’s what was generating everything for them.

But as far as I can tell, it seems like Warzone just doesn’t really know where it’s at anymore. I don’t know, I could be wrong. It could still be huge, but definitely not as prominent as it was.

I [Michael] have friends who are very into it—one in particular who plays it basically every single night—and tried to get me into it. Man, it is not for me. My whole scope of understanding is through his lens, so as far as I know, it could be the biggest thing on the planet. But at the same time, it’s just not the world I choose to live in.

They’re just rage-inducing, too. It doesn’t matter how good you are; it’s just the flip of a coin.

It’s an ever-changing zone that could possibly be not in your favor. It’s like gambling in video games: Like [shrugs], “All right, this is a free-forall. Whatever happens, happens.” I mean, yeah, some people might be able to get away with stuff just because they’re more skilled than the player that they’re fighting, but everything is just…

I don’t know. For me, whenever there’s no skill gap and the player that is more skilled doesn’t get rewarded for it, I’m just like, Ehhh.

CONTINUE AT DECIBELMAGAZINE.COM

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KENNY GROHOWSKI IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT

KILL SCREEN 056

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OUT OF SEASON RECORDS DOZENS OF FREE & EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS AT

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D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 5 : 1 5

ANTHRAX

STUDIO REPORT

ANTHRAX

G

iven the sheepish grin on Charlie Benante’s face, the

Anthrax drummer and chief songwriter is well aware that the band he’s backstopped since 1983 is nudging ALBUM TITLE into Chinese Democracy territory, considering they haven’t TBD released a full-length since 2016’s For All Kings. But it’s not like PRODUCER the members of the most colorful 25 percent of thrash metal’s Big Jay Ruston Four have been embroiled in narcissistic conflict and million-dolSTUDIO(S) lar temper tantrums. There have been tours upon tours, including their 40th anniversary celebration in 2021; reissues and home Various, including Studio 606, video releases; graphic novels; book authorship; limited-edition TRS West Studios merch drops; Benante, guitarists Scott Ian and Jonathan Donais LABEL playing in Pantera, Mr. Bungle and Shadows Fall, respectively.

Megaforce Smack dab in the middle of all of it was an international health RELEASE DATE crisis, which is where the story of Anthrax’s new album begins.

Second half of 2025 “I think one song from 2017-’18 made it into the pool, but everything else came during COVID,” Benante explains. “I was doing nothing but writing music, so I had the chance to spend time experimenting. I would send demos to the guys and they’d give me thumbs-up and we’d work on stuff. That’s how it took shape.

My original goal was to have 20 songs ready for the record.”

The first moves made were three years ago when drum tracking began at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606. Since then, Anthrax have been working on and off in various permutations and locations, chiseling Benante’s original song cache into album selections as well as future soundtrack, EP and bonus tracks.

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“We used Grohl’s studio for the drums because his studio lends itself to that—a very live, massive sound. Like the last record, we did it in sections. I would go in and track six or seven songs, then we would build them. When those were done, I’d track another bunch. There are pictures online of us in Dave’s studio; those are from the last batch of songs that were tracked.”

With members spread out from coast-to-coast and unforeseen complicating matters—Benante, at the time of our interview, was still waiting on word whether Ian’s house survived the L.A. wildfires—the band has been Frankenstein-ing their newest work together with the help of longtime Anthrax fader slider Jay Ruston while Benante tries to cork his creative wellspring.

“The fires put us in a state of not knowing what was going on, but [vocalist] Joey [Belladonna]’s going to Jay’s next month to finish the last three songs,” Benante says. “I have two more songs I’d love to try and shape, but when is enough enough? But those two could be really good, y’know?!” —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

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ANCIENT DEATH

Northeast quartet (humbly) ascends to the next big thing in modern death metal

F

ormed in 2021, Ancient Death have spent the last four years gathering strength in the veritable backwaters of the current death metal underground, honing their skills across an EP, a demo, a split—and it’s all led up to this moment: Ego Dissolution. A high point, undeniably, not only for the band, but for the genre. And it’s only their debut full-length. ¶ For Jerry Witunsky, the band’s lead guitarist and vocalist, Ego Dissolution is all about “delv[ing] further into even more vulnerable atmospheres and moods while also expanding our musical palette.” He tells us how Ancient Death “really wanted to spread the idea of hope, love and growth in our music, and let others know they aren’t alone. Ego Dissolution deals with the spectrum of emotions and more vulnerable topics such as depression, love, grief, personal growth, death, inner peace, etc. [...] Side A deals more with our feelings about existence and external struggles. This leads to Side B, which is about our deeper internal emotions and experiences. Both sides of this album are mirrors of each other; 1 8 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

you can’t have one without the other. Our internal and external experiences make us who we are.”

Since 2023, Witunsky has been splitting his time between Ancient Death and Floridian legends Atheist. He assures us this presents no problem for his own band. “Kelly [Shaefer] is an amazing friend, teacher and bandmate. He’s truly allowed me the space to be myself and has always supported our vision for Ancient Death.” “[Making Ego Dissolution] was fun in the sense that it came together relatively quickly despite changes with life stuff. But we made it work so fluidly in an old-school way!”

This from Ancient Death’s drummer Derek Moniz. He continues to explain how Ancient Death took a “pre-internet” approach to rehearsing their material. He says, “Just practicing together as a band… not too much pre-production or sterilizing, and letting the initial feel take

control of the songs, refining things as we went.”

Like a true old-school band, Ancient Death recorded Ego Dissolution in only five days. “We were really well-rehearsed by the time we recorded,” says Witunsky.

Laid down at Machines With Magnets with Seth Manchester, Ego Dissolution occupies a Goldilocks zone between organic and monstrously heavy.

“I was amazed at the proficiency of how Seth works and the ability to get so much completed with the time allowed,” says Moniz. “There are so many ways to make records these days, but this was definitely conventional and organic. We wanted to record it without a click track or drum triggers to be able to capture how earlier-era albums sounded, which was important to us, as well as know how we really perform together unassisted.”

—DUTCH PEARCE

PHOTO BY PATRICK PUCILLO

ANCIENT DEATH

GUILTLESS

GUILTLESS

The storm darkens, but grizzled metal vets defy dystopia

L

yast year, multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Josh Graham (A Storm of Light, ex-Neurosis) introduced his new vessel Guiltless with the four frowning tracks that make up the Thorns EP. The cover art bristles with a stark, spiky gray-on-black silhouette that threatens grave injury to anyone foolish enough to draw closer. That image gains weight and clarity on the cover of follow-up full-length Teeth to Sky, cementing the project’s visual identity. ¶ “The idea,” Graham explains, “was born from the concept of nuclear semiotics research, which was established by the Human Interference Task Force in the ’80s. The overall goal of nuclear semiotics is to try to warn future civilizations (10,000+ years from now) that large areas of land are contaminated with nuclear waste and should be avoided. Rather than using language, the idea revolves around creating massive foreboding architectural structures to communicate this danger, including acres of giant concrete spikes, jagged concrete cubes and other ‘menacing earthworks.’

With that concept in mind, my goal was to create a symbol that 2 0 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

immediately communicates the intensity and sound of the band before you’ve heard a single note.

It’s likely that every cover we have will be based around the symbol in various states of existence.”

Guiltless continues Graham’s fascination with our society’s corrosive effect on the planet and each other. “In the past, I had a sort of infatuation with the idea of experiencing the decline of human civilization, which was reflected in the music. Now that it feels like we’re all actually on the precipice in many ways—the global shift toward authoritarianism, inequality, our environmental decline and so on—there’s less subtlety in Guiltless’ music, artwork and lyrics.

The modern era demands pointedness, so the approach has become less romanticized, more focused and visceral, reacting to what is happening all around us right now.

“That said, at some point the dystopian ire can become somewhat

suffocating. The world is a constant jackhammer of information, always intruding these days, always wanting your attention right this minute. While that kind of bombardment is happening virtually all of the time, I am making a large effort to write lyrics outside of the noise right now. I have thrived off of that kind of cacophony in the past, especially with Storm. It’s important to me that Guiltless exists outside of our specific contemporary references, while still being relevant to our current lives.”

Graham describes Teeth to Sky as “a fully collaborative effort” with band members Dan Hawkins, Billy Graves and Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable, “which has been awesomely inspiring. We have been able to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of remote writing, where you can kind of identify each writer’s part or section. The equal collaboration has really resulted in a rounded writing effort.” —DANIEL LAKE

INGROWN

INGROWN

I

ngrown drummer charlie ritch is being a surprisingly good sport as he takes Decibel’s shit-talking about his Idaho home on the chin. The Gem State is home to the panoramic natural beauty provided by Shoshone Falls and Snake River Canyon. State capital Boise is a charming enclave of cleanliness, engaging museums, diverse eateries and one of our favorite record stores in the country (Record Exchange). The city’s extreme music scene may be small, but it’s loyal and tight-knit (plus, it gave the world Septic Death and Pushead). ¶ But banning COVID vaccines and leading the charge to overturn same-sex marriage is just the tip of the ignorance iceberg/exclusionary politics held by the state’s elected officials, a point Ritch recognizes with a sigh. He also knowingly laughs when we relay the following online analysis of where he was born and raised: “Idaho is a worse version of every state it touches. Its white supremacists are worse than eastern Washington or Oregon white supremacists. Its Mormons are worse than Utah Mormons. Its forests and national parks suck compared to Montana. And eastern Idaho is somehow more depressing than Wyoming.”

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None of this would be a discussion topic if it weren’t for the fact that the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hardcore bruisers hadn’t named their second full-length Idaho. The implication is home-state pride, which Ritch definitely possesses, but he isn’t glossing over the lovehate relationship that exists.

“No matter where you’re from, even if it sucks, you’re flying the flag for that place. That’s a thing every hardcore band ever has done.

To me, having pride about Idaho isn’t about aligning with conservative politics or whatever; it’s about, ‘This is where we’re from and we’re making it what we want it to be.’”

Part of making things the way Ingrown wanted was addressing Idaho with ongoing, pinpointed focus. The album’s 18 minutes might sound like a runaway freight train crashing into a powerviolence/ beatdown showcase, but its 11 songs were actually arranged and rearranged with meticulous care.

“We were touring so much after [debut album] Gun that every time me and [guitarist/vocalist] Ross [Hansen] would get together to try and write, we always ended up getting ready for a tour,” Ritch relates. “Ross had a couple ideas and we were soundchecking with earlier versions of songs on tours in 2023. We finally buckled down in February 2024 to demo and finalize songs before we recorded in April.”

And nothing was sacred, even during the flight to Chicago to record with producer Andy Nelson, or while in the confines of Bricktop Studios. “We were changing things on the plane,” Ritch laughs. “The ending breakdown in [second single] ‘Bullet’ was completely different. After we recorded it, we were like, ‘I don’t know.’ So, Ross and I grabbed a couple guitars, reworked the riff and re-recorded it the next day. Stuff like that.”

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

PHOTO BY NATE CONGLETON

Western grindforce focuses on what can be, not what is

MESSA

MESSA

Italian doomsters spin the black circle of inspiration

W

e’re only a few months into 2025, but Messa’s new record, The Spin, is one you’ll be adding to your yearend list come December. The Spin is a sweeping statement that draws equally from doom and goth rock, with hefty doses of classic heavy metal and jazz thrown in. And yes—real, honest-to-God jazz. Not the “they had one chunky seventh chord on an electric piano during a clean part” jazz found throughout the metal world. ¶ That said, at the heart of The Spin is a love of the shimmering sounds of the ’80s and the equipment that made it, which Messa guitarist Alberto Piccolo found inspiringly constrictive. “Using that kind of equipment makes you make some choices and choose some sounds.

It’s easier to get to the point,” he says. “You have to stick to the plan and be able to write well with those sounds.” ¶ The record wasn’t originally conceived to have any specific period vibe. Songs on The Spin were written as far back as 2023, 2 4 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

and then formed into their original state during a six-week writing session in a 500-year-old Italian villa. When discussing the writing process and the fact that The Spin was recorded and rearranged at three separate studios, Messa vocalist Sara Bianchin says the band simply refused to fall in love with any of the material until it was finished.

“Back when we wrote those songs, we didn’t have a sharp vision in mind,” she explains. “In order to have a record that made sense from start to finish to us, to make it coherent, we had to rework it.”

But why the ’80s vibe? And more interestingly, why not an overt throwback replete with synthesizers, stacked vocal harmonies and gated drums? For Bianchin, a darker and generally gothier sound

was both challenging and more fitting when it came to a new Messa record.

“I’ve been a really big fan of ’80s music since I was a kid,” she says.

“My mom used to listen to Killing Joke and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

She was a big Bauhaus fan. She still is. I always loved it very much.

When we were trying to understand what we wanted to achieve for this record, we decided to delve into the ’80s territory because it’s something we’ve never done before, and it’s interesting for us. It pushes us out of our comfort zone as musicians.

There’s always something new you can learn and a new sonic territory you can explore.”

The Spin might be a love letter to the past, but it’s also a map of new territories for the future.

—GREG KENNELTY

IDLE HEIRS

IDLE HEIRS

Coalesce frontman’s personal therapy evolves into a full-band catharsis

IT’S

early afternoon when Sean Ingram calls from a Philly restaurant. That night is the first live show of his new band, Idle Heirs, and he can’t stop worrying about the first three minutes. ¶ “I’m having major anxiety,” he says, “because it starts with just guitar and me singing, very softly. And it could completely fall flat.” ¶ Ingram is, of course, no stranger to being a frontman. As the vocalist for Coalesce, his scream has long been considered one of the most savage and iconic in math/metal/hardcore. But while longtime fans can rest assured those legendary pipes are still present on the band’s debut album, Life Is Violence, much of his performance, and the music itself, strays far from the concussive chaos he’s best known for. ¶ But first let’s go back a few years. ¶ “We lost a good friend, Corey Lawrence, who was incredibly important to me and the entire crew in Kansas City,” Ingram says of the skateboarder who died in 2021.

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“It took me about a year to process that and reexamine my life. I fell into a black hole, and it was my wife who said, ‘Hey, you need to do music again.’”

He’d tried something with friend and local producer Josh Barber, which didn’t go anywhere, but Barber would occasionally call and talk about giving it another shot.

“At one point I said, ‘Hey, write something or don’t call me anymore,’” remembers Ingram. “I don’t dream of doing things—I just do them or don’t. So, he wrote the last song on the record, ‘Momma,’ and sent it to me. I wanted to try new things, and hearing that, I thought, All right, this guy also wants to do something unique.”

And the album establishes quickly that nothing is off the table for the duo, moving from sparse, fragile balladry to volatile

post-metal; strings, keyboards and other sounds course throughout with the confidence and polish of a band deep into their career. Ironically, it seems that’s in part because the band had no real intention of releasing it.

“The idea was this was really just going to be a private exercise,” Ingram says. “The only audience in mind for this record was us.”

That is, until Life Is Violence was recorded and the band decided to see how far they could take it and how serious this could become. That’s still a big question, but before it gets answered, there was still that first show they had to play. And later that night, after Idle Heirs had left the stage and reflected on how it went, Ingram posted two words on his Instagram, addressed to no one in particular: Nailed it. —SHANE MEHLING

TRIBUNAL

TRIBUNAL

Canadian death/gloom eulogists crush the scales of justice

THE

last time i spoke with Tribunal founders Soren Mourne and Etienne Flinn, they were preparing to release their debut record. The world had not yet heard The Weight of Remembrance, which carried the torched candelabra of both Candlemassive traditional doom and Paradise Lost’s Gothic. By the year’s end, Tribunal’s bow landed on Decibel’s Top 40 Albums of the Year. Add a spot on Decibel’s Most Anticipated Albums of 2025, and there are way more eyes on Tribunal than there were during our chat two years ago. ¶ While touring with Mares of Thrace, Tribunal witnessed audiences learning their music in real-time. Their writing is deeply personal, but universal in reach. Drummer Dallas Alice even came up with the idea of selling handwritten lyrics at the merch table as a more personal and creative way to connect with fans. ¶ “It was surreal to look into the crowd and see people, total strangers singing along to our music,” Mourne recalls.

“We have seen people crying at our shows. Classical musicians tell us how meaningful it is to hear all the classical influences, 2 8 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

and that the music speaks to them and invites them in. Some people talk to us after our sets about how much the music helped them during difficult times. It feels like a profound honor to create music that helps some people through those periods of transition and loss.”

Soon those fans will have new lyrics to learn. Tribunal’s upcoming record, In Penitence and Ruin, retains the debut’s dusky atmosphere, while shaping compositions that are slightly shorter and stagefriendly. Opener “Incarnadine” washes over the listener with a crimson wave of moody cello and piano. Mourne’s grandiose vocals peel the scab off “A Wound Unhealing” to unleash Flinn’s death rasps. The album is a powerful exploration of justice and retribution, guilt and atonement, hauntingly textured by Juno-award winning engineer Jesse Gander.

Despite Weight’s excellence, In Penitence and Ruin is still a distinct step forward. Like Mourne’s hand-painted cover, the album’s shadows feel even darker. The songs are an extreme dichotomy of growling menace and strength in vulnerability. With their studio alchemy complete, the band now waits before removing the album’s shroud. But as Tribunal’s dual vocalists promise on the new album, “Nothing stays buried forever.”

“This time, we are sort of enjoying the time before the album is announced,” Flinn admits. “It’s nice to all get in the same room and jam the new songs as a band without being on tour or the studio. But I also have to acknowledge that the anticipation feels like there’s more pressure to create something that’s bigger than just us in the band.” —SEAN FRASIER

SERPENT RIDER

SERPENT RIDER L.A. crew incorporates the Grecian formula in their epic metal

THE

first time i listened to early Septic Flesh and Rotting Christ, I was completely enthralled,” begins Brandon Corsair, guitarist and backing vocalist behind American epic metal outfit Serpent Rider. “It’s music that evokes the feeling of overgrown and in-use temples, witches lurking in a bog [and] stone altars.” ¶ Co-owner of Nameless Grave Records and mastermind behind The Highway Corsair fanzine, Corsair is also a member of death metal outfits Draghkar and Drawn & Quartered. In Serpent Rider, he sonically scratches an entirely different itch, blending Greek black metal with epic metal in unexpectedly beautiful ways. ¶ “[Those bands are] ‘atmospheric’ in a way that most metal actually branded that way could never hope to be, but still chock full of riffs and metal might!” he continues. “I love as well how, unlike many other scenes, the Greek one—and to an extent the entire Mediterranean metal scene—never pretended to be a separate and new movement. Many of those bands covered heavy metal songs [and] some of them had heavy metal side projects 3 0 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

even in the ’90s, at a time when that was deeply untrendy. That resonates with me deeply as a songwriter that likes to openly blend my influences.”

If that explanation fails to contextualize Serpent Rider, nothing will. After all, the band merges heavy with light, is thematically centered upon the fantastical and medieval, and boasts the unexpectedly gentle vocals of R. Villar, who emulates the utterly obscure Lethean and Lordian Guard. This strange assortment works impeccably, making Serpent Rider’s debut, The Ichor of Chimaera (also featuring bassist Brian Verderber, drummer Drake Graves and guitarist Paul Gelbach), a love song to heavy metal.

“Ever since I heard Leather [Leone] sing ‘Mystery of Illusion’

by Chastain, I was inspired to sing metal,” enthuses Villar, a trained vocalist with a history in musical

theater. “Before that, I didn’t think it was something I could do because my voice and the way I write vocal lines aren’t what you would associate with metal. [But] touring helped me realize that I need to embrace my strengths as a vocalist. I’m not Leather or Ann Wilson from Heart! It gave me the confidence to be myself.

I saw other performers and how they were just having fun onstage.

They’re not trying to prove they belong; they’re just making music they like, and that’s what I wanted to do. So, for this album, I really leaned into my strength, which is clean singing.”

She concludes, “I can really bring the drama, the life into the words.

Some people may not like that, and that’s okay, but to me, singing is about that. Putting life into words, telling a story and being myself.”

—SARAH KITTERINGHAM

RE!!

MORE ANDD MO N, AN TION, ACTIO FI, AC SCII FI, LT, SC CULT, OR,, CU RROR HORR HO

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VENOM

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A kidnapping goes awry when a furious Black Mamba snake is let loose in the house.

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Here, Eureka Classics presents two of the Venom Mob’s best: The Daredevils and Ode to Gallantry.

prison for murdering his unfaithful wife, Yamashita is released on parole, accompanied only by his pet eel.

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RWAKE

RETURN IN TIME TURN TO SOUNDTRACK END TIMES story by JAMIE LUDWIG • photo by BRETT COLE

e’re just months into 2025, and American society has steamrolled

toward something so horrifyingly absurd that even the worst dystopian novelist would be embarrassed to have dreamt it up. Scarier still is that the wheels appear to be moving fast enough that, for better or worse (likely worse), the state of the world could look vastly different between my writing this sentence and your reading it. That said, one thing you can feel genuinely invigorated by in this Kafkaesque time is that psychedelic sludge greats Rwake have emerged with their first new full-length in 14 years, The Return of Magik. ¶ “I think we need [the album] as much as the world needs it right now,” says vocalist and keyboardist Brittany Fugate. “It’s confrontational, but it’s still very uplifting, and I think that’s what we all need right now—a mix of both.” ¶ From some artists, the suggestion that the world “needs” their music would sound pompous at best, but if you think Rwake are about ego or arrogance, you haven’t been paying attention. The band formed in Little Rock in 1996, and four of its current members—Fugate, lyricist and vocalist Chris “C.T.” Terry, bassist Reid Raley, and drummer and chief songwriter Jeff Morgan (who is also married to Fugate)—have played together since 1999.

MUAY EE C ICBI B EE LL 32 : J N E2 02 20 52 4: :D D

Their ties stretch back even further. Fugate has known Terry since she was 13, and she met Morgan and Reid before she was old enough to vote. Guitarist John Judkins was a longtime friend of the band before he joined in 2011.

According to Fugate, “We’ve seen each other at our worst, we’ve seen each other at our best, and I think that’s a really great thing as far as collaborating. We don’t even have to talk a lot of times—we know what each other is thinking.”

To say Little Rock wasn’t particularly friendly to subculture kids in the late ’90s is an understatement. “There was no scene, so we had to create one,” Fugate says. “And in Arkansas, especially growing up, we were just so oppressed. There were towns where they wouldn’t even allow MTV.” That left Rwake to develop in relative isolation compared to their bigger-city peers, and they used the opportunity to explore their most outlandish impulses, crafting dynamic songs that could shred your face off, lull you into a

pastoral abyss, and leave you with a sense of unease or triumph from moment to moment.

Their spellbinding male-female vocals and mindbending alchemy of death metal, black metal, hardcore, folk, prog and more stood out in an era when underground metal was highly maledominated and segmented by genre. “It was hard for people to understand what we were trying to do,” Fugate reasons, “because, to them, either we didn’t sing enough, we didn’t scream enough, we weren’t fast enough or we weren’t slow enough.

There wasn’t one genre that you could put us in.”

For those lucky enough to get it, Rwake were a force to be reckoned with. After years of touring, they signed to Relapse in 2006, where they dropped their fourth album, 2007’s Voices of Omens, which cemented their reputation as one of the most devastating experimental bands in their corner of heavy music. But shortly after releasing their next record, 2011’s colossal Rest, Rwake took an extended hiatus, though they continued to play occasional regional shows.

“We’d spent our 20s building this musical career around the world,” Fugate says, “but we hadn’t really ever built anything at home. So, we took a break to build our careers outside of music and started building on our families.”

By the time Morgan began writing material for The Return of Magik in 2018, some members had left Arkansas, though they occasionally flew in to collaborate. Then in 2020, COVID hit and founding guitarist Kris “Gravy” Graves, who’d been

struggling with his health, officially left the group. It might’ve been tempting to hang it up at that point, but the challenges reinforced Rwake’s commitment to each other and their music.

I THINK WE NEED [THE RETURN OF MAGIK] AS MUCH AS THE WORLD NEEDS IT RIGHT NOW.

IT’S CONFRONTATIONAL, BUT IT’S STILL VERY UPLIFTING— A MIX OF BOTH. Brittany Fugate “Suddenly, we’re literally locked in our homes, and we have all this time to reflect,” Fugate says. “That’s when we were like, ‘Okay,

we all need this in our lives. We’re going to make conscious efforts to do what we need to do in order to make this happen.’”

In early 2024, Rwake entered Hensley, AR’s East End Sound with longtime collaborator Sanford Parker to record The Return of Magik. The album, which marks their first studio output with Judkins and new lead guitarist Austin Sublett, is a deeply engrossing emotional journey that balances earthy, cosmic and hellacious atmospheres with pristine acoustic guitar interplay, outsized doomy riffs and exquisite psychedelic sections that burst into cathartic release.

The record’s themes and attitude characteristically touch on (and grapple with) the band’s southern lineage, and on “Distant Constellations and the Psychedelic Incarceration,” they go a step further, opening the track with a spokenword passage written and performed by Jim “Dandy” Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas. “That song has everything to me that you could ask for,” Fugate says. “The only thing missing would be a cello and a violin—then we’d really be rounding it out.”

Due to family responsibilities, Rwake won’t tour on the scale they did back in the day, but Fugate says they hope to play as many short runs and one-offs as their schedules allow. “When you get all six of us on a stage, and we’re feeding off each other’s energies, and you add a room full of people, I really do feel like that’s a religious moment. And there’s no substitute for that.”

DD EE C ICBI B EE L L: :J U MNAY E 2024 5 : 33

Gary Holt

recounts the raging early days of the bay area thrash scene and Exodus’ recording of ‘Bonded by Blood’

in an exclusive book excerpt from

‘A Fabulous Disaster:

From the Garage to Madison Square Gard

en, the Hard Way’

ON

April 1, legendary Exodus (and Slayer!) guitarist Gary Holt will release his official autobiography, A Fabulous Disaster: From the Garage to Madison Square Garden, the Hard Way, with a co-authoring credit from none other than longtime Decibel

contributor Adem Tepedelen. As we gear up for Exodus’ rare performance of the Bonded by Blood album in its entirety at this year’s Metal & Beer Fest: Philly, we proudly present the following excerpt, which transports readers back to 1984, when modern dystopia was still classified as fiction, posers attended shows in fear and Slayer wore eyeliner.

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Chapter 8:

THE

bigger Exodus got in the Bay Area, the greater the swath of the place. We even used the upside-down cross

destruction we left in our wake. Our shows had reached a new level of insanity. It may be hard to fully comprehend the vibe in the scene at the time if you weren’t there, but the best way to describe the energy of the mix of punks and metalheads at these shows was rabid. We had a violent thrash metal gang of lunatic friends we dubbed the “Slay Team”—Andy “Airborne” Andersen, Alexis Olson, Lonnie Hunolt (Rick’s bro), Toby Rage (R.I.P.) and others—who were typically the primary instigators of mayhem. They were doing severe stage diving, like off the top of the PA, and also a little thing we called head walking. The Slay Team would be onstage drinking for most of the show doing security, but when it was time to join the fun, Toby would run off the stage and step on people’s heads. I’ve seen him make it 20 or 25 feet. The guy was like six-foot-three or six-foot-four, with long, giant legs, and he’d be walking on heads like they were stepping stones. Or he’d leap off the balcony, doing these helicopter stage dives, his legs twirling like a top.

But the bad behavior wasn’t limited to the Slay Team. Paul Baloff, as our frontman, put the fear of god into people in the scene, should they be a poser. If you look at old photos, you’ll see he had these scraps of fabric tied around his wrists. We all did. Those were people’s hair-band shirts. We all carried knives back then—I still carry a knife—and Paul would go up to someone, “Fuck Mötley Crüe! I’m gonna cut that shirt!”

He’d pull out his knife, slice off a big shred and tie it around his wrist. He had four inches of poser shirts around his wrist. He was also known to randomly shout, “All posers must die! Kill a poser!” And posers got nervous when Paul said that shit. That said, we had a couple of hair-band dudes on the Slay Team who were on our protected list, because they were every bit as obnoxious and horrible as we were.

We once again found kindred souls both musically and personally when Slayer made their way up from L.A. for their first Bay Area performances in January 1984. You could say that Exodus helped prime the pump for these guys to be welcomed with open arms. They’d just released their debut, Show No Mercy, the previous month, but the glammed-up L.A. scene didn’t exactly appreciate the music they were playing.

Thanks to the groundwork Exodus had laid by this point, though, Slayer, just like Metallica a year previous, found a very receptive audience for what they were doing.

They were in the Bay Area for two nights, and the first one, January 27, 1984, we weren’t on the

bill. We’d already heard some of their music, and Baloff and I loved ’em from the first listen, so we went to the show to meet them. Not surprisingly, we bonded immediately. It was a spontaneous Vulcan mind meld, and we were instant friends.

Back then, that’s the way it was if you liked this music. It was the same with Metallica. We were partying after the show from night one like we were friends for years.

The funny thing is, in Slayer’s early days, Kerry King didn’t drink, but the rest of the band did. So, I hung out with Jeff Hanneman more because he liked to fucking pound the beers and shit. That first night at the Keystone, Jeff gifted me the slide guitar upside-down cross that’s in his photo on Show No Mercy. It was probably one of the single greatest pieces of Hanneman memorabilia, and it was in my possession until the ’90s, when I somehow lost track of it. Maybe it got lost in a move or my divorce—I don’t know.

To this day, I’m super bummed about that.

After that first show, we ended up at their motel, the Cove Motel on University Avenue in Berkeley, and we proceeded to destroy the place. I mean, we reached a level of destruction that had to be admired. We tried creating—and were pretty much successful—a doorway from the wall into the bathroom. We spiked pizza to the ceilings with screwdrivers. Jeff pulled out a giant bag of popcorn the size of a beanbag chair, and before he could even get out the words You guys want to destroy the room? we were on it.

Popcorn flying, television ruined. We wrecked

Jeff gave me to rip the mattresses up. At one point, someone said the cops were coming, and we said, See you tomorrow, bye!

Before we left, though, we gave them a piece of advice for the next night’s show with us at Ruthie’s: lose the makeup. We told them, With the Ruthie’s Inn crowd, it’s gonna change their entire perspective of you if you’re wearing eyeliner. You gotta get rid of that shit. So they never wore it again. After the show, we went back to the Cove, pulled the pizza off the ceiling and ate it.

The next time I saw Kerry King, a month later at Ruthie’s, he was playing guitar in Megadeth, Dave Mustaine’s new post-Metallica band. I hung out a lot with Dave when Exodus played those early Metallica shows together, more than with James or Lars. We all did, but I kind of gravitated toward Dave more, and vice versa, because we were both evil as fuck. Kerry was temporarily—emphasis on temporarily—helping Megadeth out as they got on their feet; Slayer were still together. A headstrong guy like Kerry’s not meant to be in a band like Megadeth with one guy (Dave) calling all the shots. That would’ve been a hard lineup to make work long-term, I think. Their playing styles are also very different. Thank Satan for Kerry staying in Slayer!

But the Exodus crew all showed up to support two of our friends. We were fucking stoked to see Megadeth and were probably fucking hammered because Ruthie’s fed us all the alcohol we could want for free. I thought Megadeth were killer and musically different from Metallica. Dave definitely went in a little different direction. It would’ve been real easy to just do “Hit the Lights Part 2” and songs like that, but he went a little more technical, and the rest is history. He’s a legend, a good friend, and he’s always been a big supporter of Exodus, which I suppose he has to be since we’re blood brothers.

One night sitting around Baloff’s house— drunk as fuck and probably snorting a little meth—Dave, Baloff and I cut ourselves, shared blood and became blood brothers. This is something we did back then—remember, we all had knives or a razor blade—blissfully unaware of hepatitis C, AIDS and other blood-borne illnesses.

Fortunately, the only thing I’m carrying around today are the scars and memories, but these incidents were yet another inspiration for the song “Bonded by Blood.”

D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 5 : 3 5

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT

DAVE [MUSTAINE], [PAUL] BALOFF AND I CUT OURSELVES, SHARED BLOOD AND BECAME BLOOD BROTHERS. THIS IS SOMETHING WE DID BACK THEN—REMEMBER, WE ALL HAD KNIVES OR A RAZOR BLADE— BLISSFULLY UNAWARE OF HEPATITIS C, AIDS AND OTHER BLOOD-BORNE ILLNESSES.

FORTUNATELY, THE ONLY THING I’M CARRYING AROUND TODAY ARE THE SCARS AND MEMORIES.

 Blood has been shed Holt (center l) and the entire Bonded by Blood-era Blood-era Exodus lineup came to slay

By early 1984, Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax had all released their debut albums. We knew it was time for Exodus to do the same. We had the songs. By this point, most of the Kirk-era material was gone from our set. We’d play some of those older tracks—“Dying by His Hand” and “Impaler”—if we needed to lengthen our set, but we knew we weren’t going to record them for our debut. Though this lineup of Exodus never made a proper demo, live recordings of our shows and rehearsals were circulated by tape-traders around the world. As a result, we were a known commodity worldwide, even though we’d never played outside of the Bay Area. It was this notoriety, as well as our reputation in the Bay Area, that led to a couple of Exodus fans in Scarsdale, NY, Todd Gordon and Ken Adams, starting their own indie label, Torrid Records, and offering to put out our debut. Though we could have checked in with the other indie metal labels of the day that our friends and bands we admired were on—Megaforce (Metallica), Combat (Venom), Metal Blade (Slayer)—we were super excited that these guys were launching their label to make an album for us. They were the ones who showed up, and we were just like, Yeah, a record deal! Let’s go!

In late May 1984, about a month before we were to go into the studio to record our debut, we loaded our gear into Doug Piercy of Anvil Chorus’ studio on Turk Street to record a pre-production demo. We laid down 10 tracks in total, but never really finished them, adding vocals to only three. There are aspects of my performance on 3 6 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

this recording, however, that I prefer to what I did on our debut. There are some solos I like better because I was using my preferred guitar, my candy-red Strat. We were poor kids back then, and by the time we recorded Bonded by Blood in July, that guitar wasn’t working right. It had some structural issues, and it wasn’t staying in tune; the intonation had gone to shit. So, for Bonded, I used my black Fernandes Strat that had a Kahler whammy bar, and I just couldn’t hit the high-pitched whammy bar dive bombs that, around the Bay Area, I was famous for. I hate Kahlers to this day. It’s a beautifully designed whammy bar, but it just doesn’t do what I want it to. There are some lead breaks on the Turk Street demo that are exactly what I wanted. It was a shame I couldn’t have transferred them over to the album sessions.

The pre-production demo was a good warm-up, but when it came time to make the album, our manager/producer, Mark Whitaker, found us a studio, Prairie Sun, which was on a big ranch up in Cotati. It was perfect for us because it had multiple cabins on the property so we could live there while we were recording. It wasn’t so good for studio owner Mark “Mooka” Rennick, because in typical Exodus fashion, we left a trail of destruction that was second to none, to quote Judas Priest. We spent about two weeks on the album, and we just raged at night. We had the full Slay Team entourage there with us. And since Cotati is about an hour and a half north of San Francisco, other friends would come up

in the evenings, and we would commence to let loose. Our beer of choice was Schmidt’s, this shitty, cheap beer that had fish on the packaging. We drank I don’t know how many cases of Schmidt’s and the cheapest vodka you could buy.

And we smoked a lot of weed. We were partying and getting fucking hammered and breaking shit. Friends would get into fistfights with friends just over some bullshit. And then we’d wake up the next day and start tracking again.

It was probably the most fun recording session I’ve ever had. We were super well-rehearsed.

The songs were part of our DNA by then. All our parts were totally down. We just rocked it. Baloff killed it except for one line on the album that Paul could not get no matter how many times he tried. It was a line in “Deliver Us to Evil” where he sings, “By my lord, my god, my master, Lucifer.” He couldn’t get the phrasing; it just threw him off. Finally, John Volaitis, our engineer, ran out of the control room and into the vocal booth and said, “I’m gonna do it.” He did his best Baloff impersonation on that one line, and it was perfect; it’s on the album. It’s the ultimate piece of Bonded by Blood trivia. Paul killed everything else really well. Another smaller bit of trivia is that we actually recorded one track that didn’t end up on the album, “Death Row.” We’d demoed it with Doug during pre-production, but never ended up putting vocals on it at Prairie Sun (or at the Turk Street session). And since the Bonded by Blood master tapes are missing, that one is lost to the ages.

interview by

QA j. bennett

WI T H

SPIRITWORLD’s mastermind on writing songs based on a novel in progress and not caring what the tough guys think

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D

ecibel is supposed to be talking with SpiritWorld mastermind Stu do what I do and turn in finished products. For

Folsom about his band’s new album, but instead we’re looking down the barrel of his cat’s butthole. The video connection is working just fine and, for a few minutes there, we could see Stu in his home office in Vegas, with his Danzig and Nick Cave posters on the wall behind him. Then his kitty intervened. “This is Wild Impala,” he says by way of introduction. “Not to be confused with the psych rock Tame Impala.

She’s our COVID quarantine pickup.” ¶ As it turns out, Folsom wrote most of SpiritWorld’s third and latest album, Helldorado, in this very room. Like previous SW albums, it features Folsom’s patented brand of countrified metallic hardcore. But whereas the band’s first two records were companion pieces to Godlessness, Folsom’s book of western horror stories, Helldorado draws inspiration from his follow-up novel—which is still in progress. “The new album is kind of fragments of things that happen in the novel I’m working on,” he says. “It isn’t as linear. Some of the lyrics are tied to the book, but some aren’t.” ¶ If all goes according to plan, SpiritWorld will be on the road with Obituary and Nails by the time you read this. As much as Folsom enjoys touring, he enjoys being home with his girlfriend—and Wild Impala, of course—even more. “Sometimes I feel like a band in my position, where you’re on a good label and you have the opportunity to tour, this is where most people are like, ‘Well, I think we can do this full-time if we all just go 100 percent,’” our man says. “But I have a life I like, so I balance art with that life.

I don’t have any sort of pressure to do anything except what I’m into and proud of.”

The first two SpiritWorld albums were companion pieces to your book of short stories.

Helldorado is sort of a preview to the novel you’re currently working on. Is it strange to be working the other way around?

It’s all one big happy clusterfuck. On the first two records, there’s definitely songs pulled straight from the book. If you’ve read some of those stories, there’s a clear connection. But with this one, nobody’s really read anything that I’ve been writing, so I feel like a crazy person. Some of this stuff I’ve been working on for three years, like the characters and the themes and things, so I feel like it’s all happening at the same time. This one will be a new experience for fans of the band because there isn’t a fiction companion piece to this yet where they can dig deeper.

I was imagining a Game of Thrones situation, where the show passed the existing timeline of the books. So, I was thinking your lyrics on Helldorado maybe got ahead of your story in the novel. But maybe that’s not quite what’s going on.

I’ve been working on these things in tandem, and I don’t know when [the novel] will be finished. I mean, you know how it is when you write stuff—when it feels good, you go with the flow. When you get stuck, maybe you stop for  PHOTO BY JA SMINE GARCIA

a while. I’m at the point where I know the big milestones of what’s going to happen with some of the characters, but there’s definitely some things that are going to change. So, when you write a record that’s kind of a concept album based on a thing that’s a work in progress, I guess it’s a little confusing.

Did the fact that the novel isn’t finished push the songs in new or unexpected directions?

I think the songs went in unexpected directions, but I don’t know why. I write a lot of this stuff in isolation. I sit here in this little office studio space, and I’ve figured out over the years how to make records without needing anybody. I was playing my acoustic guitar and had this cool finger-picking pattern that I started playing over and over. I was supposed to be writing heavy parts, but I just kept playing it. And then I’m putting words to it and adding saxophone and shit, and I thought it was cool as fuck. I don’t know how it ties into where I originally started this record, but it’s on the album now.

So, it’s hard for me to say. I think you get excited by other influences or forms and it’s all a big, jumbled mess. I don’t have any idea what I’m doing. I just do what feels good to me. I’m very lucky that I don’t have bandmates. Not that I’m opposed to collaborative writing, but [with SpiritWorld] there’s no other input. I just

better or worse, that’s how I like doing things, just because I’m neurotic and I don’t like communicating ideas that aren’t fully formed.

In the past, you’ve said you approach SpiritWorld from the viewpoint of a movie director. Why is that important for you?

Through the years, I’ve been really involved in the DIY hardcore punk scene. I booked shows for 10 years at a junkyard, and every dude in a legit hardcore band has my phone number. Plus, I was in a hardcore band that toured, so I was kinda stuck in that world. But then artistically, I don’t want to be anything that somebody else is already doing, and I don’t want to conform to any of those things. So, this band is my genre piece, my horror-western thing, like a director would do. But if I decide that I want to do something different, then maybe I’m going to move into my sci-fi industrial era on the next record.

I’m still mining horror-western because it’s still fun. But I can’t imagine doing it forever. I think Amon Amarth are on album 12 or 13 with their Viking thing, and—no disrespect—I just can’t do that. There’s no way I’m doing the same thing 12 times. At some point, I want to change and do something else. So, I’m kind of looking at this like Tarantino. All of his films have his own style, but one is a buddy picture, one is a kung fu movie; he’s got a couple westerns, and so on.

You said the same thing when you were doing interviews for the last SpiritWorld album, Deathwestern, as well. It didn’t happen this time, obviously, but how close do you think you are to ditching the western theme?

Pretty close, I think. I feel like when you’re trying to do something, you get close to the idea, but you don’t get there all the time. With Deathwestern—the album art, the record, the live show—I didn’t quite hit everything. And I’m not sure that I did on this one. Take our new suits: I feel like I finally did a better job of translating the Nudie suits in my head into existence. But on some level, I am trying to perfect this thing because it’s fun and it’s so personal to me. And then I want to get this book out. But probably right around then, I’d imagine it’ll be time to do a big reinvention.

But I’m a fan of music first and foremost. I’m not a musician. I’m not a rock star. So, I want to do something that also serves the people who like my band. That said, as much as I strive to do something new, I’m not going to flip on a dime.

It’s like… I went and saw Bob Dylan when I was younger, and the set was all deep cuts. But I wanted to hear some hits. I left the show like, “That show wasn’t for us. It was for him.”

D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 5 : 3 9

Southwest of heaven  Folsom (c) and his gang aren’t quite ready to let their cowpoke story ride off into the sunset

I’m still mining horror-western because it’s still fun.

But I can’t imagine doing it forever. I think Amon Amarth are on album 12 or 13 with their Viking thing, and—no disrespect— I just can’t do that.

It’s just my shit. I grew up obsessing over both of those. I was too young for the thrash metal of the ’80s, so for me it was the late ’80s stuff into the early ’90s Roadrunner catalog. And then I was around when Victory Records blew up in the late ’90s into the early 2000s, so it was Snapcase and Blood for Blood and Hatebreed and Integrity. My homies in Curl Up and Die were playing with Converge and Cave In. So, all these things are on the aggressive side, but I’ve always listened to country music, too. Half of my family is total hillbillies, out trapping coyotes and rodeoing.

4 0 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

On the other side, my older brother was into punk rock, but he also loved singer-songwriter stuff. And then the alt-country honky-tonk scene that I grew up in is its own scene you can dive into and never come up for air. Once I found all those bands on Bloodshot, like Whiskeytown and Old 97’s, I was digging back into John Prine, Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt—he was a huge one for me—Bob Dylan and Steve Earle.

I’ve revisited Bob Dylan about 25 times in my life, and you get into different albums at different times. The guy was so goddamn good. Same thing with Nick Cave and Tom Waits. There’s just certain people like that who I can really appreciate because they really commit to things.

The animated video for “Western Stars & the Apocalypse” is cool, but also funny. And hardcore isn’t known for its sense of humor.

Why was it important for you to include some levity? The guys who stand in the back with their arms crossed will not approve.

I don’t make stuff for those guys. And I’m guilty of being that guy, especially if I don’t wanna be there. But when we’re in the van, we’re funny. My older brother plays bass and one of my really close friends is playing rhythm guitar, and we’re just joking around on tour. We have our own language of comedy through the years, like most bands do.

So, I don’t shy away from that. I am who I am, and if it turns off those guys in the back because maybe it seems like we’re not taking things serious, my response to all that is: Go start your own band, bro.

I’m a testament to the fact that you don’t need one bit of talent. You can go from being a fan of music to anything you wanna do. Don’t talk shit about me. Go make your own thing and then get back to me with how well you execute your vision.

PHOTO BY JA SMINE GARCIA

Your new song “Western Stars & the Apocalypse” was partly inspired by listening to Bob Dylan while you were on tour with Agnostic Front, which is how you ended up with a song that’s part NYHC and part folkie. What about that specific combination appealed to you?

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

Dropping Thor’s Hammer the making of Unleashed’s Where No Life Dwells M AY 2 0 2 5 : 4 2 : D E C I B E L

by

chris dick

The following Hall of Fame story originally appeared in Decibel’s long out-of-print Top 100 Death Metal Albums of All Time special issue back in 2012. After the passing of former Unleashed guitarist Fredrik Lindgren in December 2024, we’ve decided to reprint it here in tribute to his legacy as part of Swedish death metal history. Rest in Power, Fredrik.

IN

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UNLEASHED

Where No Life Dwells CENT URY MEDIA MAY 17, 1991

The original (Swedish) Viking death cult

the early ’90s, the general death metal assumption was that

bands from Sweden—particularly Stockholm and its suburbs—were carbon copies of Nihilist. And then Entombed. And then Dismember. Certainly, the second and third generation of Swedes that hell-spawned bands from the subterranean thrust of Hall of Fame records Left Hand Path and Like an Ever Flowing Stream intentionally emulated and then repossessed the “Stockholm Sound” as their own, but several Swedes from the earliest and nastiest days of Swedish death metal never wanted to haunt the same chapel, so to speak. Unleashed, which formed immediately after Johnny Hedlund was ousted from/left Nihilist, had an interpretation of death metal unlike their peers in Sweden. Instead of a maze of riffs inspired by horror movies—and dirty Americans in Autopsy and Repulsion—lead-master Hedlund and his newly minted Unleashed opted not for the right or left hand paths, but to trailblaze their own.

By centering on songcraft, but not losing sight of Swedish death metal mores, Unleashed—in many respects—reflected the output of Venom, Motörhead, Sodom and, yes, Autopsy. That is to say, they wrote clearly defined, traditionally structured songs—the tap-your-foot, bang-your-brains-out kind expressly tailored for the stage—when complexity and histrionic displays of musicianship were all the rage. As early as debut demo The Utter Dark and its follow-up …Revenge (both from ’90), Unleashed were different. Brutal all the same, but the songwriting concept—simpler is better—was advanced for the era. Maybe it was retro before there was retro, but it’d take Entombed and Dismember a few years/records to figure out what Unleashed had already known and parlayed into their two demos, the now ultrarare EP And the Laughter Has Died… and debut full-length, Where No Life Dwells.

Unleashed were well-known to tape-traders, but the Swedes were interested in more. Not just a one-off on an obscure foreign label (of which there were plenty), but tours, promotion and follow-up records. Like any other young, energized group of dudes, they wanted to pursue their idols. They got the deal they were looking for (sort of) by signing to then-nascent Century Media.

Clearly, the label saw potential in an ex-Nihilist product, and brisk sales of Unleashed demos—3,000-plus copies each—made the possibility of a fulllength an easier sell. So, Unleashed ferried down to Germany twice—in ’90 for a promo and in ’91 for Where No Life Dwells—to record where no Swedish band dared. For logistical, linguistic and economic reasons, Unleashed’s contemporaries stayed closed to home at the time. But by venturing away from studios in Stockholm and into the arms of producer/Despair guitarist Waldemar Sorychta in Dortmund, the Swedes found a new sonic signature.

Where No Life Dwells isn’t like other Swedish death metal records of the era.

Songs like “Dead Forever,” “Before the Creation of Time,” “Unleashed,” “If They Had Eyes” and “Into Glory Ride” had power and clarity. Coupled with Sorychta’s clear yet punchy production—more like Colin Richardson than, say, Tomas Skogsberg—Unleashed’s songs didn’t have to be studied or endlessly revisited to understand. They were built on an array of tightly controlled and repeated riffs—the rhythm section replicated the idea—so the end result mirrored British heavy metal more than the (equally enjoyable) murk emanating out of Stockholm. Additionally, Hedlund and company were the first to incorporate Viking motifs—lyrical and aesthetical—into the deathiest of metal. While it may not be a distinguishing factor now, from a historical perspective, it immediately set Unleashed apart. Sure, they had anti-Christian and D&D-based lyrics, but the Viking thing was absolutely unique.

Joining Entombed and Dismember at one end of the Hall, and Motörhead and Venom at the other, it’s with great respect we finally open the doors to Unleashed’s Where No Life Dwells. Onward into glory ride, boys!

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UNLEASHED where no life dwells

What do you remember about the year leading up to Where No Life Dwells?

JOHNNY HEDLUND: Headbanging and parties in the wild. [Laughs] Or, in a local, not-too-crowded subway station. Now, these were the days when there weren’t too many shows around, and not too many places would host 20-40 deathbangers with Autopsy and Morbid Angel on full volume. I guess you could say we had a great time wherever we found a spot where we could be left alone, sometimes on a mountain. Or wherever, really.

I had a mountain very close to my apartment where we used to have pretty large parties. The best was that nobody could complain since we were way out in the wild.

ANDERS SCHULTZ: The “golden” years! [Laughs] Yeah, those were good times. We spent a lot of time as you do as kids, just drinking and being rowdy. Chaos in the streets, more or less. A gang of metalheads roaming around with tape recorders and beer. In parks and streets in the summer, and the subway in the winters. There were not so many of us in those days, so people found each other even if we were not from the same parts of the city. And, of course, a lot of time spent in the practice room. And as soon as things started happening with the band after the demos, we got to do some cool things—like the Bolt Thrower/ Nocturnus tour—and went down to Germany to record a 7-inch.

TOMAS MÅSGARD: I recall we spent a lot of time in the rehearsal room and had a lot of fun back then. We went to Germany to record a 7-inch (And the Laughter Has Died...) in late ’90, and I remember we toured with Bolt Thrower and Nocturnus in early winter ’91. That was our first tour. It was a good experience, looking back. Our horrible “tour bus”—a.k.a. “freeze mobile”—was a VW bus from, say, 1938. The side sliding door flew right off [after] first loading. No heat, not enough seating, one guy had to sit in the back on a merch box holding a gas tube warming device.

I was the driver, and the guys had to scrape the ice from the inside of the windshield in order for me to be able to see. We slept at venues, which weren’t always that nice. It worked for a few days, and then we demanded a RV, which we got!

How did Fredrik Lindgren, Anders and Tomas come into the Unleashed fold? Seems like they were plucked out of thin death metal air, as their previous band history isn’t well known.

HEDLUND: Well, I think they all had their little bands just like I had Nihilist way back then.

Anders was there almost from the start, and

“Our horrible “tour bus”—a.k.a. “freeze mobile”— was a VW bus from, say, 1938. I was the driver, and the guys had to scrape the ice from the inside of the windshield in order for me to be able to see.”

TO MAS MÅSGA RD naturally I met the young son of a gun at a party, drinking far too much for his age. I think I had to take care of him somehow, only to end up buying hard liquor for him later on, but what the heck. He had to become a real drummer now that he was in Unleashed. [Laughs] I found Fredrik Lindgren at some punk/hardcore party back in the mid-’80, long before Unleashed. See, at the time, thrashers—as we were called before death metal was invented here in Sweden—had no place to party at all, and perhaps there were only around 15 or 20 of us that you really knew from weekend to weekend. We had to join the punks since they always had places to go and something brutal happening. Fredrik was one of those guys with long hair always talking about Kreator or Metallica.

So, we got along very well. Tomas was in the band also, like Anders very early on, but shortly before recording of the first album. I think we must have met Tomas at a party up north. Our former guitar player had him under his radar.

them to court, but it would cost [a lot]. We were young and inexperienced back then. And passionate musicians. We couldn’t think for a second they would blow us to the moon. But we now know they couldn’t care less about the music. They were only in it for the buck.

SCHULTZ: I can’t really remember why things didn’t happen with Peaceville, but it was basically between them and Century Media, and we chose the latter. I guess they were more enthusiastic about the whole thing. I remember they called me at my parents’ house to ask if we wanted to sign and where to send a big package of stuff they had released. I was like 16 years old and freaking out, and [had] no idea what to say to some dude calling from Germany. [Laughs] MÅSGARD: I joined the band in the fall of ’90, and by then the deal was pretty much already done, if I remember correctly. It was a cool thing to get a record deal, of course.

Unleashed were originally going to sign to Deaf/Peaceville. In the end, you landed on Century Media. What do you remember about Unleashed’s label choices, and what it was like to finally land a deal?

Unleashed were different from other Stockholm bands. More organized compositionally; a different lyrical take; cleaner production.

Why was that? Because you were more concerned about playing live than creating studio-only albums?

HEDLUND: Well, we had an offer from Peaceville in early ’90, but we were never signed to them.

Century Media was the only label in the ’90s we were signed to. I guess we signed to them because they could promise an early touring schedule.

The record deal itself is still, to this day, a slave contract and illegal to the core. We could take

HEDLUND: Naturally, we were and still are [very] much about taking this live as quickly as we could. Unleashed is live music above all. But we also wanted to make death metal that people could remember and actually scream along to, as opposed to riff collections aimed for more technical fans and guitar players. Our main

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DBHOF245

UNLEASHED where no life dwells

influence was also the Viking traditions and values, which we introduced into death metal music back in 1989. Heavy Load and Bathory did it in heavy metal and black metal, so we thought it should work with death metal, too.

And it still does.

SCHULTZ: I’m not sure if we were more organized.

Not sure if I agree that we had a more clean production either. But different, yeah, for sure.

We didn’t want to sound like the others from the same area, so we did try to distance ourselves sound-wise. But true, we have always felt that the live atmosphere is the most important part of the band and, of course, it’s great if that comes through in the recordings as well.

LINDGREN: Because Johnny and me hated everything. We didn’t care. Fuck the world.

Were the songs on Where No Life Dwells written in a jam room environment or crafted singularly

by Johnny?

HEDLUND: Most of them were written by me alone in the countryside way up north, where I have a cottage. But, of course, we tried them out in the practice room a lot before recording and deciding what and how, etc.

SCHULTZ: A bit of both, I’d say. The early songs were all written by Johnny, but they were all jammed in the practice room with all the guys having their input.

How would you compare the songs that were carried over from the demos to the songs written for Where No Life Dwells? They’re more measured than the older tunes.

recall. Maybe some slight changes, but I think mostly the sound is what differs. The demos we did were recorded very cheaply, of course, since we were broke, and in those days people didn’t really know how to deal with death metal, so the guy running the studio we used had no idea what to make of it, really. I remember the first time we showed up and started recording, and the guy just sat there like a question mark! [Laughs] Do you remember what records you were listening to and how they influenced Unleashed?

I hear Autopsy, but I think structurally it’s almost like Motörhead.

HEDLUND: You’re right. Motörhead, Venom, Celtic Frost, Autopsy and Death and so on were among the early influences—also, for the structure of creating tunes. As for the riffing and melodies, all things death and black metal were and still are an influence to some extent.

SCHULTZ: Well, in those days I say almost everything you grew up on was some sort of influence. Of course, a lot of the stuff coming out at the time was influential—like, as mentioned, Autopsy—but also stuff like Morbid Angel, Death, Necrovore, Bolt Thrower. Well, the list is endless, really. But, yeah, also earlier stuff like Motörhead and Venom, etc. I mean, I’d say the whole childhood from heavy metal and onward was an influence. And not to mention a lot of punk and hardcore as well.

LINDGREN: Venom, Exploited, Sabbath, Maiden, Motörhead, Priest, GBH, Slayer, Destruction, Sodom, Pistols, Kreator. The same shit as you probably are listening to now.

HEDLUND: I don’t really remember, but I think we

What did you mean by saying Unleashed was “utter dark death metal”?

just took the songs we had and made them more tight—more professional than on the demo tapes.

SCHULTZ: The songs that went from the demos were, in general, exactly the same as far as I

HEDLUND: It didn’t get more dark than that. But keep in mind, this was in 1989.

SCHULTZ: Well, there was nothing more dark than the utter dark, was there?

Anders’ drumming differs from the usual doublebass all the time. The double-bass was used more sparingly. Curious how you approached the drums differently from other drummers of the day and genre.

SCHULTZ: Well, I’m not sure to this day, really.

[Laughs] I mean, at the time of the earliest stuff, I was only 16, and by the time we did Where No Life Dwells, I was barely 18. So, I just tried to keep up and make the best of it in a way, to be honest. So many infl uences, and of course limited knowledge just made for some mad beats! [Laughs] But then, as well as still, I believe making it all fi t together is more important than standing out.

The songs speak more than individual playing.

So, as far as the double-bass, or lack of it, is [concerned], whatever we felt fit the songs best.

Was Unleashed very much Johnny’s project? I think, at the time, he was viewed as Mr. Dictator, but I’m not too sure how people view the album as time rolled on.

HEDLUND: Wow, I wonder why nobody told me about it. [Laughs] I have to say I really think we, at least in the present, have an amazingly wellworking band democracy. But looking back at 1989 and on, I think if there was no one in control of things, we wouldn’t still be around today. Drinking is nice, but you also have to have a steady course. An aim as a band that you never go away from in order to keep working and improving all the time. I think perhaps I tried very hard to never let this ship sink, but to keep sailing across the open sea and claim victories.

Again, like we do to this day.

SCHULTZ: From the start, no doubt it was his project, or idea. And he was definitely most in control. But I think most bands have at least one member taking creative leads in one way or other. But that doesn’t mean all bands have a dictator. The band has been a democracy from the start in decision making of all sorts, so it’s nothing more than rumors, I think.

the top 3

WHERE NO LIFE DWELLS MEMORIES

BY ROBERT K AMPF

1

On their first-ever tour with Nocturnus and Bolt Thrower in January 1991, they had to be true Vikings; in the middle of winter, the door to their beat-up VW minibus did not close, and they had to more or less hold it shut, which created below-zero temperatures inside all through the tour.

2

Founder, Century Media Records

While recording Where No Life Dwells, they were staying at a musician’s apartment rented from the local biker club. The bikers ran a metal club called Spirit, which was in the building below. I remember like it was yesterday, how, after a heavy drinking night, Johnny dragged Fredrik by his feet back to the apartment. Both Johnny and Fredrik easily had a bottle or two of vodka. True warrior drinking!

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3

The band played—after already having recorded Shadows in the Deep—one last show on their Where No Life Dwells cycle. It was at the legendary Dynamo club in Eindhoven, Holland. Seeing it, I had goosebumps the whole show. They were so mighty good. That night, they made the step from very good to great, and I knew right there that now they were an unstoppable force.

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UNLEASHED where no life dwells

MÅSGARD: Johnny made most of the songs back

then, if that made him ”Mr. Dictator.” [Laughs] We were and are a band with four members, and we are all part of Unleashed.

A lot of people may mistakenly think Unleashed derived the Viking/Norse themes from Bathory.

But, in reality, they—along with Johnny’s first Thor’s Hammer necklace—came from Johnny’s father. Was Johnny’s father responsible for you pursuing and then creating the first Viking death metal?

HEDLUND: Not really. The spirit of our ancestors

and the Viking traditions and values are what we have drawn most of our inspirations from.

All the way since 1989, when we were formed.

Naturally, my father and grandfather played a role to some extent.

SCHULTZ: The idea of incorporating those lyrical themes were our own. It felt like a fitting subject to the music we played, and more or less no one was doing it in this genre, so we went with it.

LINDGREN: I love Bathory’s first three albums.

Raggare are a bunch of motherfuckers.

There were other inspirations as well.

Dungeons & Dragons in “If They Had Eyes.”

“Before the Creation of Time” has an existential component to it. Can you comment on some of the other lyric themes and how they relate to Where No Life Dwells?

HEDLUND: Well, we have made many different lyrics over the years. Many of the anti-Christian type lyrics. The impotency of Christ has been a major topic also on Where No Life Dwells. I think we grew up with that from day one. Also, some of the gore-type lyrics in the scene back then

were an inspiration to some lyrics. It was death metal the way it started back then. We just mixed it into our style and kept on creating from there. So, I guess we really had a few different topics.

SCHULTZ: There were a lot of subjects and themes back then. And [they] actually have always been on every record, except for the last couple ones, which have had a bit of a theme to them. But it was pretty mixed; a lot of anti-Christian, as well as antisocial, themes. Like, for example, “A Life Beyond” [from Shadows in the Deep], which has always been a bit of a personal favorite for me.

How much input did you have on the Axel Hermann cover? I think it’s pretty fitting. The silver ink was a nice touch, too.

HEDLUND: We asked him for a certain feeling to it, and it came out good, I think. I don’t recall too much about the actual process, though.

SCHULTZ: I can’t really recall. But I believe it was a rather good process. I do remember seeing drafts and making changes and so on. It did, in any case, turn out good with the feeling we wanted.

MÅSGARD: We had a good communication doing that cover. I think we actually were at the Century Media office looking at the first painting in Axel’s studio, and were very happy with the direction it was going. In the end, he captured how we wanted it to look.

Why did Unleashed go to Woodhouse Studios in Germany rather than stay in Stockholm and use, say, Sunlight Studios?

HEDLUND: We really needed to get our own sound going back then, so we figured it was best we tried something that the other bands from

“Drinking is nice, but you also have to have a steady course.

I tried very hard to never let this ship sink, but to keep sailing across the open sea and claim victories.”

J O H NNY H E DLU N D Cosmetic effects  Hedlund’s set list originally included “If They Had Boobs Eyes”

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Sweden had not already tried. I think it was a pretty good choice, thinking back on it.

SCHULTZ: We definitely wanted to get away from the Sunlight Sound of the time as yet another way of making sure we got our own sound and style. And Woodhouse was available to the label, so we decided to go with it. Turned out very good, as far as I see it. I’m quite proud of it.

LINDGREN: Woodhouse was our record company Century Media’s idea. But we thought it was a good idea because we wanted to record anywhere except in Sunlight, where every band sounded the same. I don’t [mean to] say those bands sounded bad, [but] we just wanted to find our own sound. And to this day I don’t regret it. I actually think we should have recorded all our Unleashed albums there. I won’t say this album has a great sound, but for what we were at the time and for this music, it’s good; and most of all, we didn’t follow the Stockholm or Florida sound.

Did you have a production blueprint for Where No Life Dwells? Production jobs on records that you wanted to emulate, for example?

SCHULTZ: Not really. We were not very experienced at the time. And in some ways had no idea what we were doing! [Laughs] No, really, of course, we had ideas of sounds we wanted and a general idea of how we wanted it to turn out, but not much more than that. We just went with it as we did with most things. More feeling than skill in a lot of ways. But that makes it honest, and I would not change it.

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What was your time like at Woodhouse Studios?

Any fun stories, or was it all work and no play?

HEDLUND: It was a lot of fun, of course. Some of the days after we had recorded, we had loads of parties with the guys from Rock Hard magazine in Germany. I still recall those parties as being absolutely amazing. We had a blast for sure. But the recording process was, of course, a priority.

SCHULTZ: There was definitely a lot of play.

Obviously, the recordings were the priority, but we went out at night and partied quite hard around the rock clubs and bars of Dortmund. I can’t remember if it was during the Where No Life Dwells recording or at an earlier time, we saw Demolition Hammer play at a club and hung out with those guys and partied. There were some great times, in any case!

MÅSGARD: We had a good time in Woodhouse, I recall. A lot of work, of course, but also some fun. We went to the local rock bar occasionally and one night we had forgot—lost?—the key to the friend’s place where we lived and had to smash the window to get in. He was surprised when he got back.

LINDGREN: Just being in a studio outside Sweden recording your first full-length album was one of the coolest things in our lives. I’ll guess it’s the same for everyone from that generation [before Internet and home studios]. It was like a dream come true. We didn’t have much studio time, so there wasn’t time for that rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle like on a tour. We slept on the floor in an apartment in Dortmund.

Every early morning, Waldemar picked us up in his small car and we drove to the Woodhouse for 30 minutes or whatever it was. One of the nights, we also played a show in Dortmund with Demolition Hammer. I remember we all had neck and back pain from headbanging the rest of the days we were in the studio after that. I think we had like seven days in the studio. Don’t get me wrong—we had a lot of laughs—but we had to stay kind of focused all the time.

Waldemar was a great guy and helped us a lot. I guess the only big argument was when he wanted us to have click bass drums like Pantera.

We had to stop him. Even Siggi [Bemm] the studio owner said, “No.” A smaller argument was when Siggi said we couldn’t use the acoustic intro I made up in the studio because it wasn’t played properly. We, or I, didn’t care. We wanted a short acoustic intro like Kreator’s short acoustic intro for Pleasure to Kill.

Unfortunately, I have a big bad memory as well from that studio session. I heard that one of my closest friends, Pelle [a.k.a. Dead from Morbid, Mayhem], had killed himself. So, from being very happy to be in a studio recording your first album, this was a big setback. I got the message after the recording was done, but we were still in Germany

WHERE NO LIFE DWELLS COVER ARTIST AXEL HERMANN WALKS US THROUGH THE UTTER DARK by chris dick

What do you remember about painting the cover for Where No Life Dwells?

AXEL HERMANN: Actually, I did not listen to

any music of the band beforehand. I think it was done at the time I designed the [Night of the] Stormrider piece for Iced Earth. Maybe that theme did project itself a little. I do not really recall. Anyway, it was done without any sketches or concept. I just started. Purely airbrushing. The rest developed itself during the work process. An icy, desolated and empty environment, suitable for projection and free interpretation. The tiny figure was added after finishing the artwork. Just to have some sort of center detail. I think it was a request by the band. What really upgraded the cover was the transparent silver-ish layer that was added by the printer.

It was a commissioned piece, right? I gather the back-and-forth between you and the band helped the final piece solidify.

Not really. As stated, it was a spontaneous illustration. Like most of the stuff I did back then.

What mediums did you use for the Where No Life Dwells cover?

Airbrush only. Those were the days when this kind of technique was highly requested. No masking film or any other tools. Just a white plain cardboard and off I went.

What was the size of the original piece?

42” x 31”.

waiting for mastering the album or something like that. Actually, I first thought it was a false rumor. I didn’t believe or realize it until I went back to Sweden. I guess it was a sign. Where No Life Dwells was recorded and Dead had killed himself.

Pelle himself would have laughed. Pelle R.I.P. What do you remember about your first U.S. tour with Entombed and Morbid Angel? Or was that the European jaunt? I distinctly recall you playing the Michigan Deathfest.

HEDLUND: We did both Europe and the USA with Morbid Angel back then. An amazing couple of tours. Many good memories. And, of course, too many drinks and almost never a shower in sight.

I think I showered two or three times a month on that very European tour. Lovely!

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I’m curious how arrangements were made back then. You were like Century Media’s in-house cover artist. At least that was the perception.

The first four or five years, I definitely was.

Then on and off until 1999. Robert Kampf and I were already friends back then, so that I had my own little studio within the Century Media offices. In that way, we had a very close and effective line of communication. Helped a lot to get things done pleasantly, because we both had/have very high standards of what artwork should be like. Since I had the luck (and advantage) of being around when the whole death metal scene came into existence (at least on my radar screen), I somehow grew into it. That does not actually mean that my entire musical taste was evolving around that style of music—I am a KISS fan first and foremost—but this segment of heavy metal absolutely mirrored my style of painting and my inner turmoil and personal anger at that time. Actually, listening to Asphyx, for example, calmed me down pretty good.

Looking back on the cover of Where No Life Dwells, what do you make of it? It’s been 21 years now.

I did not like the artwork for a couple of years.

But that’s my usual perception of my work anyway. All could have been done way better, etc. I tend to relate more to the negative aspects and technical mistakes of my artwork. Always analyzing and criticizing. Took me a lot of years to be pleased or fond of my own work. But it gets better. [Laughs]

SCHULTZ: I do actually recall one of those early U.S. tours getting mixed into a festival of sorts, so that must be the one. Well, we actually did a tour with Morbid [Angel] and Entombed in Europe as well, but the U.S. tour was first.

Regardless, both of those tours were amazing! Let loose a bunch of young Swedish metalheads on a nightliner and you can expect chaos! [Laughs] So many weird and crazy times and, of course, brilliant shows!

MÅSGARD: That tour was a blast! That much I remember, but I can’t remember Michigan Deathfest. It was really cool to do a U.S. tour. We shared a nightliner with Entombed and it was six weeks of party. We did two European and one U.S. tour with Morbid Angel that year. Recorded the album in April. We also did a tour with

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UNLEASHED where no life dwells

“Johnny and me hated everything. We didn’t care. Fuck the world.”

F R ED RIK LIND G RE N Bolt Thrower and one with Cancer, so that was a busy year for us.

When Where No Life Dwells was released, did you think it would matter 20-plus years later?

HEDLUND: Yes, I did. But I am kind of happy our warriors care more for the new stuff since that is what keeps us going. The younger fans don’t have the same experience of the older records, so we have to play more new stuff than old these days.

But I am good with that. It’s how it should be.

SCHULTZ: I don’t know, to be honest. In those days, [I] personally, at least, didn’t have much interest in the future. I really never thought along those lines at all. We were doing our thing and just going for it. As we still do, but nowadays as a grown-up—sort of—I do have a sense of the future.

MÅSGARD: I remember listening to the finished product after the recording and thinking this is good stuff that will leave a mark. And it’s cool that it still matters.

LINDGREN: Didn’t think about it back then. We didn’t care. We loved metal and just wanted to kick ass. Playing metal, getting drunk, headbanging and listening to music.

What do you make of bands and fans telling you Where No Life Dwells was influential to them,

whether personally or musically?

HEDLUND: I am, of course, very happy about

that. It was a rough time back then, but we did all we could to get our music out to the warriors. I think we got out just in the right time of things. When we introduced the Viking traditions and values into death metal, I was pretty sure we had the right vibe of things.

Since we toured so much, we also got to meet a lot of people instantly and got told we were making something really solid. A fantastic feeling even to this day. There is nothing better than hearing what people have to say about the new album, and especially when they scream along to the choruses.

SCHULTZ: It’s a great honor, certainly. As I mentioned previously, personally having the feeling that when we did that album, we were just going balls-out doing our thing, not really caring about anything else, what anyone thought or anything like that. And really working our asses off. It was no easy life, that’s for sure. But then hearing that it actually mattered and influenced people is fantastic.

MÅSGARD: Of course, it’s very nice to have bands and people coming up to you and say that they have been inspired by Where No Life Dwells, or that it was the first death metal album they bought and telling stories like when they listen to it M AY 2 0 2 5 : 5 2 : D E C I B E L

and bang their heads off. Or making love to their girlfriends. [Laughs] Great!

Looking back on Where No Life Dwells, is there anything you’d change? I recall when Shadows in the Deep was released, you criticized the album’s lack of tempo variety.

HEDLUND: I guess that’s pretty accurate. But looking back at it now, I’d rather make a brand new album than spend time on changing an older one.

It had its time and it should be that way. We still play songs live from that album, and are happy about how it came out for the time. Hail, Odin!

SCHULTZ: I wouldn’t change a thing. Never. At the time Shadows came out, we were really happy with it, and for sure I have a hard time saying which I prefer just looking at the songs, production and all that. But just for being the first, and for all the experiences and craziness that came with those days, I have to say that Where No Life Dwells has a special place in my heart, definitely!

To me, it’s just fucking perfect.

LINDGREN: Haven’t heard the album for years— maybe passed-out drunk—but of course there is.

I’m proud of the album. Was back then, at least.

Yes, it could’ve been more aggressive and doomy, but it’s not about fine art. It’s about the finest art: metal. Love it or hate it, because we don’t care.

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How emerged from their tumultuous post-pandemic era lighter, but sonically heavier than ever

D

story by BRAD SANDERS // photos by SHIMON KARMEL eafheaven, more than most metal bands, exists as an ongoing experi-

ment—a series of inquiries and explorations, an empirical process of expansion and refinement. 2011’s Roads to Judah introduced the Californians in a haze of wind-tunnel drums and lush guitars, with frontman George Clarke’s serrated howl cutting through the mist.

Sunbather came next, and we don’t need to belabor how that first-ballot Decibel Hall of Famer broke the (already limited) critical faculties of the trve kvlt black metal set. New Bermuda was both heavier and hookier, but it was blighted by a real-life darkness at the heart of the band. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love was the first Deafheaven album written after Clarke and cofounder Kerry McCoy got sober, and its varied (even for Deafheaven) palette reflects a lightness of being that was absent from its predecessor. That set the stage for 2021’s Infinite Granite, the band’s controversial (even for Deafheaven!) pivot away from the blast beats, tremolo-picking and harsh vocals that had underpinned even their dreamiest work.

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Not quite four years after the shock of Infinite Granite, Deafheaven are set to return with their sixth LP, Lonely People With Power. It’s an album that synthesizes every era of the band into a cohesive sound while introducing new wrinkles of its own. It marks the third consecutive Deafheaven album with the same lineup— Clarke on vocals, McCoy and Shiv Mehra on guitar, Dan Tracy on drums and Chris Johnson on bass—and the second helmed by producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen. And yes, if it wasn’t clear, there’s plenty of black metal on it. When the first single, the blistering “Magnolia,” hit the digital airwaves in January, a lot of fans offered an assessment along the lines of “Deafheaven is back!” Clarke, whose resurgent shrieks earn top billing on the song, thinks that’s a little funny.

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I felt like there was a real conscious realization that, ‘Oh, this is our sound.’

That sound is fairly expansive, and there’s a lot of elements that go into that sound.

BUT THIS RECORD, IN MANY WAYS, SOUNDS THE MOST US. GEORGE CLARKE

“We were sort of nervous that people were going to be like, ‘It’s a return to form,’” he says.

“Because we haven’t really left this world.

We just took a little sidestep, tried some other stuff out. But regardless, people are excited.

We’re excited!”

McCoy has a longstanding policy of not reading the comments, a habit he wisely kicked in the wake of Sunbather-era overreactions from both sides of the trve/untrve aisle. Clarke would keep him abreast of what was happening on social media, while his mom would fill him in on the Deafheaven subreddit. But even McCoy has been tapping in to see what the Deafheaven faithful have been saying about Lonely People With Power. “It just seems like most people are just stoked,” he says. “That’s rare for us, I think.”

McCoy and Clarke agree that they could only have arrived at Lonely People With Power by working through and learning from the rest of their discography first. Their trials—in the scientific method sense, as well as the sense of trials and tribulations—have led them to this place.

They just had to take the next step. In doing so, they’ve discovered the Deafheaven they’ve been working toward for the past 15 years.

“Deafheaven has kind of been a journey about finding that sound, of finding who we are,” Clarke says. “Because we can be so many

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things, and we tend to be so many things.

There’s this idea that we’re always almost going out of our way to challenge our own expectations. And for whatever reason, this time around, I think because we were kind of aware that these songs were sounding like us, I felt like there was a real conscious realization that, ‘Oh, this is our sound.’ That sound is fairly expansive, and there’s a lot of elements that go into that sound. But this record, in many ways, sounds the most us. It’s almost like we’ve finally truly figured it out.”

COMBATING ALL DESTINIES Clarke’s rejection of the “return to form” framing for Lonely People With Power comes, as much as anything, from the fact that the band sees Infinite Granite as a success on its own terms. Its confrontational lack of metal-ness (the scorchedearth finale of “Mombasa” notwithstanding) wasn’t something that factored into the album’s creation, which Clarke and McCoy both describe as intuitive and open.

“When the riffs were coming and that’s what they were sounding like, we made a conscious decision not to fight it,” Clarke says. “We’re not forcing anything, which I think is kind of what helps drive this band. We go with our instinct.

And at the time, that’s where it was going.”

“We’ve never thought like, ‘Will people like this? Will this record do well?’” McCoy adds. “I think the second you start thinking about that, you’re in deep trouble. So, that was where that came from: just a restless need to explore that side of us. And I think it came out pretty good.”

Infinite Granite was, in fact, a major reinvention for Deafheaven, just not in the way that fans might have perceived it to be. The band’s wholehearted embrace of ’90s shoegaze and dreampop textures was a slow-moving, oncoming train that left its station of origin on Sunbather, if not Roads to Judah. An eventual collision felt inevitable. What was less predictable was the way the band would upend their working process. After making their first four records with their friend Jack Shirley, a gifted but workmanlike engineer who McCoy says is “like an Albini, essentially,” Deafheaven elected to take on a more collaborative producer for the first time. Enter Justin Meldal-Johnsen, known for his work with acts like Beck, M83 and St. Vincent. Be careful how you apportion credit for Infinite Granite’s indiefriendlier turn, though: Meldal-Johnsen agreed to work with the band before learning what direction their writing was heading in.

“He thought that we would be making a Deafheaven record, a metal record. And he was very excited to work on a metal album, because he likes metal and has his own bank of influences,” Clarke says. “And then we ended up making Infinite.”

“I hadn’t heard a note of music,” MeldalJohnsen confirms. “We were just talking concepts and ideals and manifestos. I wasn’t responding to demos, for instance, initially.”

Meldal-Johnsen and Deafheaven didn’t speak the same musical language when they started work on Infinite Granite, but they quickly set about finding common words in their disparate vocabularies. Deafheaven, like most metal bands, tend to build their songs out of a latticework of interlocking riffs. Even when it became clear that the riffs for Infinite Granite weren’t really going to sound like metal riffs, they still served as the fundamental building blocks of the new material. For McCoy and Mehra, writing a song was always essentially about figuring out how to sequence the riffs. Meldal-Johnsen has never worked that way.

“Riffs were more incidental in anything I was doing,” he says. “Whereas with Deafheaven, riffs were the core of it. They were the idea, so they needed to be magnified. They needed to be larger than life. They needed to be given the right amount of support. So, we needed to figure out how to make riffs, in their parlance, work with the sort of more ephemeral ways I would describe making music: atmosphere, or mood, or the shape of songs.”

As the band and their producer groped toward a shared understanding of the music they

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were making together, Infinite Granite began to take shape. Pre-production, something that had rarely been formalized in Deafheaven’s world up to that point, was a months-long process, taking place at band practices, writing sessions, and power lunches at some of L.A.’s finest delis and diners. While Deafheaven had always remained open to being pulled in different directions by their creative energies, they had long operated on a kind of first idea, best idea model. That all changed on Infinite Granite.

“I think they would have an idea for a part of a song, a section or a fragment, and it wouldn’t really get altered from its inception to its completion very much,” Meldal-Johnsen says. “Whereas I was trying to offer alternative forks in the road at every chance that we had, so that I gave them a lot of opportunity to expand their approach and their range a bit. You take a section of a song, and there might be a literal way of doing it, or a way that very much aligns with historical Deafheaven. And I was trying to offer them two or three other avenues that could be pursued.”

“We did change a lot of the way we write songs, and we implemented tons of new ideas, things we hadn’t done in the past. And there was a lot of molding that took place, and a lot of making mistakes and going back to the drawing board,” Clarke concurs. “There’s another thing about Infinite, which is we did it during the pandemic, and we had a lot of time. And we used that time to make these songs, and it really was this huge exercise. And having come out the other side of that, I do feel like our prowess is so much more expanded. I feel like as musicians, because of that record, we got a lot better at what we do. And obviously, we’ve included some of it on the newest album.”

PLACES OF YOUR LIFE, OVERGROWN Infinite Granite came out in August 2021 on Sargent House, the boutique label that also served as Deafheaven’s management company at the time. It was the band’s first studio album for the label, following stints on Deathwish Inc. and Anti-, and it added another dimension to their longtime working relationship with Cathy Pellow, their then-manager and Sargent House’s founder. A little over a year later, the musician Henry Kohen, who records as Mylets, accused Pellow of verbal and emotional abuse and ignoring reports of sexual assault that took place at Sargent House’s communal residence in Los Angeles. Soon thereafter, Sargent House artists Chelsea Wolfe, Lingua Ignota and King Woman posted statements of their own, all saying they left the label because of Pellow. Within days, Pellow announced that she would be stepping away from Sargent House to focus on her mental health. While all this was happening, Deafheaven were about to leave for a lengthy

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tour supporting Infinite Granite. It quickly became clear to them that they weren’t going to be on Sargent House anymore when they got home.

“Artists were getting in touch with us being like, ‘This is my situation. This is what’s happening.’ And we were listening to them and taking what they were saying very seriously,” Clarke says. “We weren’t always sharing the same experience, but I felt that what they were expressing was valid. And when everything happened, we had a very cordial, very cool, level-headed conversation with everyone

[at Sargent House], and were just like, ‘Look, there’s nothing that I could say to express further the gratitude that we’ve had for what you've done for us, but you have to understand our position here.’ And they did.”

In the short run, leaving Sargent House meant Deafheaven were once again a truly DIY operation, in a way they hadn’t been since the Roads to Judah days. “It was me and Kerry on the phone, hours a day, sorting out what we needed to do,” Clarke says. “Thankfully, we had a lot of friends in our corner who were helping us out.”

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One such friend was Johnny Sarkis, a promoter and tour manager who they’d gotten to know through their Sargent House labelmates in Russian Circles. During the pandemic, Sarkis and McCoy fell into a rhythm of hiking Elysian Park and getting takeout together, and when the shit hit the fan with the label, he was one of the band’s first phone calls. Sarkis didn’t step into a formal managerial role, but Clarke and McCoy credit him with keeping the band from going off the rails during what Clarke charitably calls “a little bit of tumult.”

“They needed somebody who could help bridge the gap of making sure that the small things, big things, [and the] details were happening as they were getting ready to go for both a European and U.S. tour,” Sarkis says. “They were still working on the album cycle, so they just reached out to me to see if I would help with doing a lot of that stuff. And I’m happy to help. I love them and I wanted to make sure they didn’t end up having to deal with anything. Obviously, they didn’t deserve the blowback or anything like that, and they were doing whatever they could.”

The long-term plan was never for Deafheaven to remain self-managed, much less self-released, so while they were figuring out how to get through their planned tours, the band simultaneously kept an eye out for new representation.

Sarkis was helpful there, too. (“I think I was moral support,” he says, though he admits he also helped produce some options for how they might move forward.) Another key figure was the band’s longtime booking agent, Merrick Jarmulowicz, who suggested they meet with James Vitalo at Gold Theory Artist Management. They ended up signing with Gold Theory, restoring some semblance of normalcy. The next step was to find a label for the yet-to-be-recorded Lonely People With Power, which was just starting to percolate.

“The first song that was written was a different version of ‘Body Behavior,’” McCoy says. “It was the first time we’d ever recorded a demo before, and our management wanted to have a realsounding demo to shop to labels. I made the demo, like, summer of ’23 or something like that. I was just making something on acoustic guitar, and then I took it to the guys. That’s kind of the classic Deafheaven thing, where I’ve got these little bits of riffs and they have to make it through the gauntlet of each person thinking they’re cool.”

Chris Brown and Johnny Minardi from Roadrunner Records heard the demo of “Body Behavior,” which Clarke describes as being a lot closer to Can than the only somewhat krautrock-y version that wound up on the album. They liked it enough to come out to the New York City date of the Sunbather 10th anniversary tour, where they talked Type O Negative with the Deafheaven guys until late into the evening. “After that, we were like, ‘I think we’ve done something good here,’” Clarke remembers. “And now, here we are.”

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It just seems like most people are just stoked [about the new record].

THAT’S RARE FOR US, I THINK. KERRY MCCOY

ALL THESE STAGGERED OBSTACLES DISMANTLED After signing with Roadrunner, and with the turmoil of their Sargent House exit in the rearview mirror, Clarke, McCoy and the rest of the band turned in earnest to the task of songwriting. “Honestly, we came out the other side pretty unscathed, and had this open runway to make something,” Clarke says. “It really felt like the path was clear for us to do what we do at maximum capacity. Like, ‘What do we want to show the world?’”

That self-interrogation began with reengaging Meldal-Johnsen, who jumped at the opportunity to produce another Deafheaven record—especially one that seemed likely to have a little more metal in the mix. Although, to hear MeldalJohnsen tell it, he wasn’t reengaged so much as kept in the fold.

“We became buds,” he says. “I was around at all the L.A. shows. I was very aware of their lives, both personally and professionally, and what was going on with them since I first met them. There wasn’t much of a lull in our discussions and interactions. It was always ongoing. And so it was fairly organic, just segueing right into getting on the onramp of the genesis of Lonely People With Power.”

When sessions for Lonely People With Power formally began, the band had that krauted-out demo

of “Body Behavior,” plus some odds and ends they’d come up with on the road. The clean guitar intro to “Amethyst,” written during soundcheck at the Sunbather anniversary show at the Novo in L.A. The main riff of “Magnolia,” which McCoy says began life as a “psych-y, kind of early Isis riff” that they were playing around with on an off-day in Grand Rapids. Something ominously called “the Inception riff.” In the jam room, those ideas started to cohere into songs, and those songs started to signal that Lonely People would be the most sonically expansive Deafheaven album yet.

“You put [the riffs] on a whiteboard when you get in the space, and you’re trying to piece them together,” McCoy says. “‘Does this work? Does this work? I don’t know.’ And then, all of a sudden, Shiv is in there, and we’re doing a chuggier version of this ‘Magnolia’ thing, and then, ‘What if that just went to a G minor instead of an F# major?’

It’s sort of like that.”

Preparation in the lead-up to Lonely People With Power wasn’t as intensive as on Infinite Granite. Not only were the band and Meldal-Johnsen more comfortable with each other’s working processes, they also understood that this album would be a more comprehensive synthesis of Deafheaven’s interests and influences. If Infinite Granite required the band to take a few deliberate steps out of their comfort zone, then Lonely People

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would function as a new, expanded comfort zone, built atop five records’ worth of groundwork.

“Because it was going to be that amalgam of the sweeping, epic, grand statements of Ordinary and Infinite,” Meldal-Johnsen says, “mixed with this kind of weird patchwork of moments and moods and tempos and riffs and ideologies from all the albums that preceded those two albums, I didn’t really feel a need to go crazy with the pre-production in the writing phase this time.

We just all felt that there would be a way to do it that bridged the gap.”

All told, McCoy, Mehra and Tracy spent two months at the old Deafheaven practice space in Oakland, away from Meldal-Johnsen, quarrying the stone from which Lonely People With Power would be sculpted. They’d send their ideas to Johnson, who would add his basslines before passing the files on to Clarke so he could start working on vocal ideas. Meldal-Johnsen’s role this time was to help the band find the album in the wealth of raw material, and to help them shape it into something that felt distinctly Deafheaven. “It takes the process of refinement to discover it,” McCoy says. He offers “Amethyst,” the album’s longest song and dynamic centerpiece, as a prime example.

“It was a very different song when it started, and we just couldn’t get it sounding right,” he says. “We were like, ‘Let’s do a krautrock version of it! Or let’s have the whole thing just be a Neu! beat! Or what if the whole thing was literally just a Darkthrone blast? Or what if Godspeed and Spacemen 3 put their chord progressions together, and then you put a little bit of Alcest in there, and then you give it a smooth runway?’

So, it’s these things, where you start off with this intention of, ‘Let’s combine this thing and this thing, and explore these flavors of us,’ and then you wind up in this place where we’re like, ‘It kind of just sounds like Deafheaven.’”

McCoy is an insatiable music nerd, and he would regularly bring much crazier reference points than those to the table: obscure death-industrial and harsh noise, the drum machine sounds of Russian black metal demos, “Portishead chords put through a war metal filter.” While Meldal-Johnsen didn’t always have those references in his repertoire, as Clarke puts it, “he knows interesting”—and he was always more than willing to learn.

“This might sound really cheesy, but a huge part of the rationale for me diving in with Deafheaven is that I can be the student in real time,” Meldal-Johnsen says. “I can attempt to filter the things that they are turning me onto, or referencing, or asking for, and learn in real time how to execute. Honestly, for a producer, it’s kind of a dream job. If you’re willing to learn, and feel like you’re still learning, and you’re not sitting in an ivory tower dictating a process, then it’s a dream job.”

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A MAN MADE OF YESTERDAYS The most adventurous current running through the album is its trio of “Incidental” tracks. Far from mere intros and interludes, these songs find Deafheaven weaving complex leitmotifs and bringing in some of the album’s most outré sounds. “Incidental I” introduces a synth melody that reappears as a guitar riff in “Doberman.”

The power electronics exorcism that closes “Incidental II” leads into the opening thrash riff of “Revelator” the way that “We Will Rock You” leads into “We Are the Champions,” according to McCoy. (We’ll let him have it.) The Aphex Twin-inspired “Incidental III” contains a tape loop that pops back up in the clean section of “Winona.” The “Incidentals” are also the only places on the record where voices from outside the band appear: Jae Matthews from the darkwave duo Boy Harsher duets with Clarke on “Incidental II,” and Interpol’s Paul Banks recites the discomfiting spoken word of “Incidental III.” Matthews didn’t know the Deafheaven guys before they asked her to sing on the record, but after meeting up with them at a Uniform gig in L.A., she immediately became interested in the idea of recontextualizing her voice in a heavier context. Like Meldal-Johnsen, who was surprised not to be producing a black metal record when he signed on for Infinite Granite, Matthews expected to be singing over blast beats and tremolo riffs. Instead, most of her vocals on “Incidental II” are draped over a bed of barren synths that McCoy calls “the ice desert.”

“George was like, ‘We will send you something. Do whatever feels comfortable,’” Matthews recalls. “I remember I received the track, and it was really late, because at the time I was in Massachusetts. I was like, ‘OK, let me play this in the car and drive around.’ It was just the instrumental, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is not what I was imagining when I was thinking that I was going to contribute vocals on a black metal feature,’ you know? And then, as I was driving at night in the woods, and that drop happens, I almost crashed my car. And that made me really, really excited. I was like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. I think I can do this.’”

Matthews recorded her part in L.A. with Meldal-Johnsen, an experience she found nervewracking, but was ultimately glad she got to have. In addition to her desolate written verses (“I think I might be hiding from myself / It’s so good to be alone with someone else”), she laid down some wordless vocalizations in the final third of the song for Clarke to interact with. He recorded his screamed response a few days later, coming in right after the bass drop that almost made Matthews crash her car. Their unlikely harmonization is one of the most arresting moments on the record.

“Incidental III” started as a poem by Clarke. The words didn’t seem to fit any of the other songs the

band was working on, so Clarke started to think of them as an opportunity to bring in another texture, another voice. “When I started thinking about people, the first person I thought of was Paul,” he says. “We’ve been huge [Interpol] fans for a really long time. I bought [Turn on the] Bright Lights when I was like 14, and other than bands that we’ve toured with, they’re the band I’ve seen the most.” (Deafheaven would eventually open for Interpol in Chicago, a dream come true for Clarke that likely flummoxed a lot of Interpol fans.)

The poem Banks recites is a dramatization of the photograph on Lonely People With Power’s striking album cover. If humorless metalheads lost their minds over Sunbather’s pink palette, wait until they get a load of this one: A woman in heavy makeup leans into the passenger side window of a car to talk to its unseen driver. A teenage boy in the front seat tries to squirm his way out of view, but she’s fixed her eyes on him.

That’s the scene Banks narrates: “We looked toward the woman And my face burned red blushing When she asked me the questions Are you ever alone?

Are you older or younger?”

The specific context of that scene is left ambiguous (though we’re certainly invited to guess), but it ties into one of the themes that Clarke set at the core of the album. “I wanted to write more about men, and the relationships of men, and how men understand each other. It’s the strangeness of being raised by a father or a stepfather, an uncle, or just people who are older than you, and the wisdom that they bestow on you and where their motivations come from, and how you’re taught what they’re taught, often, and so there’s a level of ignorance there.”

Another key theme was the one that gave the album its title: “[I was] thinking about how, in a broad sense, people who tend to amass influence, people who tend to wield influence, don’t often possess intimate connections or friendships. And that shapes their ideas of power, and there’s a sort of moral ambiguity there.”

Clarke quickly realized that these two themes were interconnected, and a lyrical conceit linking them together quickly took shape: “I started thinking about people who have influence in our own lives, and recognizing how their perspectives shape our worldview, using loneliness as a stand-in for that ignorance I was talking about, or like a spiritual vacancy. And then that grew into this idea of how those ideas can sometimes fix themselves in you, in a way that you feel like you have a narrative or a destiny that you can’t move out of. So, part of the record deals with separating yourself from the idea of a fixed narrative, a supposed destiny, something that's been taught to you.”

D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 5 : 6 3

Historically, Deafheaven lyrics have been deeply personal to Clarke, but poeticized to the point of abstraction. For Lonely People With Power, Clarke took pains to make things “a bit more obvious, or a bit more direct.” He explains that “Amethyst,” “Winona” and “Magnolia” are all about complicated relationships with father figures in his own life. (“He’s not me! He’s not me!,” Clarke shrieks as “Amethyst” climbs toward its climax; “I loved you then, I love you now, I forgave you,” he adds a few bars later.) Even “Body Behavior,” the song Deafheaven cut as a demo before they started work on the album, unwittingly presaged its theme.

“To be blunt, ‘Body Behavior’ is about being shown pornography when you’re really young, as an attempt for an uncle or a father or stepfather to try and teach you something about the world in a very crude, awkward way, and as a means to connect with you, as a means to help you grow up,” Clarke says. “So many people I know have this same experience: ‘Yeah, such-and-such showed me this when I was 10.’ I think it’s interesting how things like that affect people into their adulthood, or has affected me and my view on relationships, or my view on women, or my view on myself or my self-esteem. So, it’s all sort of explored within that.”

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WALKING INTO BLACKNESS It makes sense that Lonely People With Power is partly about shaking off the chains of one’s presumptive destiny. That’s what Deafheaven have been doing at least since Sunbather. It’s what they did when they realized substance abuse was choking out their creativity and decided to get sober.

It’s certainly what they did when they found themselves without a label or a manager, while touring an album that a vocal portion of their fanbase didn’t seem to understand. That was a moment of profound vulnerability for the band, but Lonely People With Power isn’t a retreat. In many ways, it’s the boldest thing they’ve ever done.

“I think it’s got to be so difficult to figure out what the next album after that branching out is,” says band confidante Sarkis. “There’s bands who go too far to reinvent themselves, versus bands who try to reel things in. And it’s great hearing a record that I think stays true to both sides of it, without it feeling inauthentic. It feels like exactly where the progression of the band should be.”

“There’s no apologies for any particular tack they take,” Meldal-Johnsen adds. “They own all of it pretty thoroughly, and I think that they’ve earned that position. To have that built-in range, and that built-in emotional sweep to their thing.

Yeah, it’s black metal. But what is black metal

these days? Maybe black metal is far less dogmatic than you and I remember it to be. It seems like it’s evolving at a quick pace.”

That speedy evolution has unfolded with a big assist from George Clarke, Kerry McCoy, Shiv Mehra, Dan Tracy and Chris Johnson. A decade removed from the overheated arguments over whether Sunbather was revolutionary or not, they continue to push themselves into new territory, not out of some perverse need to prove themselves to doubters, but out of an inner flame, what Meldal-Johnsen describes as “a creative burn that needs to be acknowledged and nurtured.” Their sound has only grown more singular; their chemistry as a unit has only deepened.

“I remember when we were writing Sunbather, me and George were like, ‘We just need to find the Dan of bass playing,’” McCoy says. “And then we need to find the Dan of guitar playing. We use it as a metaphor, because Dan is a guy where I’ll be like, ‘I’m kind of thinking it’s like this,’ and then the thing he comes up with is the better version of that, that I never could have come up with. And Shiv is that on guitar, and Chris is that on bass, and George is that vocally.”

“I can’t imagine writing music with anyone else at this point,” he adds. “We can read each other’s minds, and it just goes perfectly.”

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INSIDE ≥

70 CHAMBER MAGE Metal magic 70 CORPUS OFFAL Supposed to rot

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

72 GATES OF HELL Lock out with your Grok out 74 LIK Body, rockin’ 76 MIZMOR & HELL Oregon trials

Pure Awareness

MAY

6

Sacks

23

First-half yards allowed

1

Jalen Hurts MVP

0

Threepeats

ANCIENT DEATH breathe new life into ancient death metal

T

here are commonalities found in the DNA of modern progressive death metal artists that have reached apex critical acclaim through evolutionary acts. The ability to synthesize geographical death strains—American, Canadian, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, British—into a unified whole. The ANCIENT musical dexterity to then blend DM with other extreme subDEATH genres, as well as outlier styles—prog rock, psychedelia and Ego Dissolution everything in between. The Schuldiner-esque shedding of gory P R O FO U N D LO R E thematics for introspective existentialism or philosophical concepts. All of these signifiers are found in the masterworks of contemporary prog-death bands, from Blood Incantation to Morbus Chron and Horrendous to Tomb Mold. ¶ With their immaculate full-length debut, Ego Dissolution, Ancient Death take their place at the obsidian table for esteemed DM. While 2022 EP Sacred Vessel sent a buzz underground with its amalgam of early At the Gates, Finnish filth akin to Demigod’s Slumber of Sullen Eyes, Autopsy-doom and diSEMBOWELMENT’s subterranean exorcisms, Ego Dissolution widens and refines Ancient Death’s musical vistas considerably.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

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D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 5 : 6 7

The Walpole, MA four-piece—Jasmine Alexander (bass, vocals), Ray Brouwer (guitars), Jerry Witunsky (guitars, vocals) and Derek Malone Moniz (drums)—opens Ego Dissolution with the title track, which begins with whiplash deaththrash, like Demilich fired through a wormhole and emerging in 1980s Bay Area, and transitions through numerous seamless tempo and riff changes, thrilling guitar solo/lead breaks and Opethian baroque atmospherics. Like on their EP, Ancient Death lean into shadowy death-doom throughout Ego Dissolution. Tempos drop to a bleak crawl at opportune times to add dynamism, such as the predatory bass and guitars that creep into the labyrinthine arrangement of “Breathe - Transcend,” which follows the Horrendous/Morbus Chron collision of “Breaking the Barriers of Hope.” However, there are enough twists overall that highlight a developed spatial awareness, a new command of inter-song pacing, and the power of sensory blitzkrieg (the quasi-anthemic “Unspoken Oath”).

For instance, the dual male and female screams over serrated Swedeath at the start of “Echoing Chambers Within the Dismal Mind” contrast brilliantly with preceding instrumental “Journey to the Inner Soul,” while also providing an enveloping juxtaposition within the song itself. Alexander’s sweet cleans drift across funereal doom, making AD sound like a more mystical version of the Gathering. And when they’re utilized over twisted DM—and in tandem with the hellacious screams, shouts and roars of Witunsky—it’s not short of revelatory, something that should be further harnessed on future releases.

Following moody overture “Discarnate,” closer “Violet Light Decays” combines all of AD’s strengths in a final monument. It’s tribalistic, progressively structured, full of ornate leads and spiraling solos, and packed with some of the most destructive riffs, rhythmic syncopations and harrowing vocals of the entire LP. It’s a fantastic conclusion to what has to be an early contender for extreme metal album of 2025.

—DEAN BROWN

ALLEGAEON

7

The Ossuary Lens M E TA L B L A D E

To bree or not to bree

Back in 2016, our own Neill Jameson wrote a piece excoriating the overly-voweled Allegaeon for running a crowdfunding campaign where the band threatened to break up if they didn’t meet their goal. The funny thing? They were probably actually ahead of the curve based on how severely 6 8 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

the music industry has contracted since then.

It’s a good thing they didn’t dissolve. The Ossuary Lens may not help you spell their name, but makes for a fine listen if you want tech-death that doesn’t require a master’s degree in engineering to enjoy.

A thematic meditation on death (a very underserved subject in the death metal genre), their seventh album wastes only a minute before throwing the listener into the blender.

They take a maximalist approach, their mix of rapid-fire riffs, symphonic keyboards, and zero-g drumming crushing songs like “Chaos Theory” and the black metal-edged “Dies Irae” between walls of sound. It can get a little wearying after a while—something the band seems aware of, as they enlist classical guitarist Adrian Bellue to provide a much-needed breather on “Dark Matter Dynamics.”

Longtime fans may notice the return of original vocalist Ezra Haynes, whose versatile growls producer Dave Otero layers for a similar effect to the instrumental overload. It does lead to the one real distracting moment on the record—a perfectly verbalized deathcore “BREEEEEE” squealed in the middle of “The Swarm,” the proverbial chocolate bar in the public pool. Otherwise, Allegaeon’s Patreon members have absolutely gotten their money’s worth. —JEFF TREPPEL

AMENRA

7

De Toorn/ With Fang and Claw RELAPSE

1+1=1

Two days my ears rang after revisiting Amenra’s 2005 full-length debut Mass III. Screaming Belgian doom, massive and monstrous, left my right audio channel with tinnitus just south of Pete Townshend and Bob Mould. A pair of EPs, De Toorn + With Fang and Claw, four tracks in 40 minutes, shrieks and whispers reassurance that nothing and everything’s changed since the Kortrijkers’ 1999 inception.

Ned Flanders quartet—sorry, West Flanders four—these drone sovereigns notch countless Masses outside the series’ four full-lengths, post-rock scriptures about pain, spiritualism and endurance. On 2021 pandemic evol De Doorn, Amenra’s ambient antagonism accrued deeper silence, their quiet passages every bit as tensile in presaging doom booms, but double decades down, the still (to paraphrase Willie Nelson) is still moving, only more so: calm, pure, redemptive.

Last year’s EP-length soundtrack Skunk, a luminous/ominous soundscape of extremities and remedies, accompanied the big screen 2023 domestic thriller co-starring Amenra singer Colin van Eeckhout. De Toorn + With Fang and Claw sounds of a piece, blackened post-metal of heavy resonance. Nothing truncated about its gravitas, either.

Opener “Heden” begins with a heartbeat and menacing note—Ennio Morricone in Antarctica—then sound by sound, instrument by instrument, 13 minutes of hot ‘n’ cold pointillism socks in our personal winterscape. Only toward the final precipice does the screaming and pounding begin. “De Torn (Talisman)” takes the same tact: van Eeckhout’s Flemish intonation building toward his audio mortification of the flesh.

Soul-flayer “Forlorn” employes the bells upon which the wolf skull of the cover art sits, while blink-and-you’ll-miss-it closer “Salve Mater” (5:54) cries for closure, indeed conclusion, lashing and leaving you both bothered and becalmed, majestic and pathetic, invincible and human.

—RAOUL HERNANDEZ

IGGOR CAVALERA/ 7 SHANE EMBURY Neon Gods/ Own Your Darkness COLD SPRING

All sound, no silence

Raise your hand if you knew that Iggor Cavalera released a dark ambient noise recording last April. Keep them up. I’m counting. Okay.

More than I’d thought, but fewer than might be expected, given the legendary caliber of the man’s name and his past work. And everyone who knows that Shane Embury has been flooding the zone with crystalline shards of auditory cinema under the name Dark Sky Burial since 2020? Good, that’s more like it. We’ll make noiseniks out of you unwashed heshers yet.

It’s hard to believe that anyone familiar with these two giants of death metal would guess that their combined forces would result in this alien acid trip through abyssal terrors. Though maybe “combined forces” is overstating things a bit— this is not a collaboration but a true split, with each man contributing his own side-length slab of disconcerting subliminal damnations.

Cavalera’s entry scrapes out a bona fide intro section with what sounds like a bleating harmonica before reclining into its own sensory deprivation tank, where dreams of drowned motors swell and dissolve for the better part of 20 minutes. Embury’s side is an altogether scarier affair, with spaced-out bass drones oscillating

D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 5 : 6 9

languidly on what turns out to be the tranquil surface of terrifyingly deep waters. Just before the halfway mark, amorphous sonic behemoths rise out of the dark, sirening ominously; later, their buzzing foghorn companions come braying through the night. It’s not clear if these unseen monstrosities are cohabitating or feeding on each other down there, but if we’re close enough to hear them, then we’re sure as hell not safe.

—DANIEL LAKE

CHAMBER MAGE

8

By Light of Emerald Gods

N A M E L E SS G R AV E

“Housekeeping… housekeeping?”

Never mind the fact that when I saw this record, I thought the band’s name was Chamber Maid.

Sixty seconds into the debut album by Denver’s Chamber Mage, you know what these dudes are all about: old-timey swords-and-sorcery metal.

Not the fancy stuff like Helloween, not the wonderfully latent fetish metal of Manowar, nor the cartoonishness of Powerwolf. Rather, the gritty, greasy underground trad metal in the great tradition of Manilla Road, Jag Panzer and Slough Feg; the stuff that reeks of sweaty leather, stale beer and stale cigs. The kind of music you’d see played live in a dank basement venue that attracts dudes in mullets with DIE YUPPIE SCUM scrawled on a backpatch above a buttcrack poking out of low-rise black jeans.

This is the kind of swashbuckling, rampaging metal that gets the blood pumping, the sort of music that draws the nerdiest and truest old-school heshers like rats to Godflesh. The speedy riffs by guitarists Devan Fechner and Jaden Knowles conjure images of the late, dearly missed Mark “the Shark” Shelton, their twin harmonies equal parts 1980 Iron Maiden and 2000s John Cobbett. Meanwhile, singer Avery Berg sings in a distinct, vibrato-laden howl that sells such standouts as “The Length of the Chain” (sadly not about the Buffalo Bills), “Blades on the Rampart” and the superbly titled “To Spires Deep and Caverns High.” By Light of Emerald Gods is as niche as one can get in 2025 metal, but the small crowd that yearns for Heavy Metal Like It Used to Be will be absolutely thrilled. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

CIRITH UNGOL

8

Live at the Roxy M E TA L B L A D E

Roxy music

Cirith Ungol are a singular and galvanizing band. They 7 0 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

sound like no band and have been able to make this claim for decades now. It’s likely why they have maintained a small, but impassioned following since the release of their 1981 debut, Frost and Fire. They were derided early on for playing metal that seemed to be out of step with what was going on in their very own California backyard, as well as over in the U.K. But, hey, they were from a different generation—they formed in the early ’70s—so it makes sense they were doing their own thing. A few generations later, it turns out that people really like that thing that they do.

Live at the Roxy was recorded live in Hollywood (at the Roxy, natch) in 2023, celebrating the release of Ungol’s most recent studio album, Dark Parade, and the entirety of that album is performed here. The ensuing 12 tracks are drawn largely from CU’s ’80s and ’90s output, with a good chunk taken from 1984’s King of the Dead. The recording is crisp and powerful, while the performances are a warts-and-all kind of affair. Let’s just say that not much has been touched up, and when drummer Robert Garven is a little off the mark here and there—he is nearly 70—the rest of the band just soldiers on and it all eventually works out. Garven is joined by original members Tim Baker (vocals) and Greg Lindstrom (guitar), as well as two-thirds of Night Demon, bassist Jarvis Leatherby and lead guitarist Armand John Anthony.

Baker’s screech/wail is an acquired taste, and it’s pretty much his only vocal move. Love it or hate it, no one sounds like this dude. And at 68, he can still wield it to cut through the band’s loping doom. Guitarist Anthony provides youthful energy to an ancient band with its ancient sound, adding much needed fire to every track.

Live at the Roxy isn’t going to convince anyone who dislikes Cirith Ungol to change their opinion, but it’ll absolutely satisfy the band’s rabid fans. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

CONAN

7

Violence Dimension H E AV Y P SYC H S O U N D S

If you do not listen, then to hell with you

Seven records in, Conan clearly get the whole doom-metal-that-makesyou-feel-like-you’re-on-frozen-tundra-fightingfor-your-life thing. While previous records saw the band fucking around with synthesizers and other experimental elements, their approach on their latest, Violence Dimension, is as meat-andpotatoes as it gets, showing off the genre and sound at its most raw, most primal.

The biggest flex of the record (aside from titling a track “Total Bicep,” which, props) is

the utter control over their tempo. While they can still make it feel like you’re melting into the sands of time, it’s the moments when they decide to crank things forward fast as hell that show how malleable a sound it is. “Warpsword,” at 45 seconds, is a genuine contender for the sludgecore hall of fame, mixing in do-or-die fast tempos with the grittiest of guitar tones.

The title track is a wet dream for any doom metal connoisseur. Vocals are nonexistent at the start; instead, each strum of the extremely heavy guitar builds and builds, as though you’re watching the band just find the rhythm in the moment of the song. Nearly 20 years into their career, Conan have perfected their tool kit for simple, extremely heavy and hypnotic riffs.

When vocals finally do kick in, it’s like getting snapped back into reality.

The closest thing to a radio-friendly single is “Frozen Edges of the Wound.” It gallops to the finish line, feeling like a little miracle with how much they pack into just three minutes. Closer “Ocean of Boiling Skin” is “let’s play the slow riff slower and slower and slower” at its platonic ideal, pure amplifier meditation and crunch at its best. Why else would you listen to doom metal, anyway? —JOHN HILL

CORPUS OFFAL

8

Corpus Offal 20 BUCK SPIN

Keep on rotting

Cerebral Rot’s 2024 decomposition seemed ill-advised from an outsider’s view, given the Seattle filthdwellers had received critical acclaim for their lurching and dank death/doom—particularly regarding second LP Excretion of Mortality, which, for what it’s worth, received a 9/10 score here and landed at number 16 in our Top 40 of 2021. A top-tier modern DM band hacked off at the knees while on an artistic ascent is never nice to witness. But, out of that entity’s putridity, Corpus Offal have crawled.

Featuring the Cerebral Rot pairing of vocalist/guitarist Ian Schwab and guitarist Clyle Lindstrom—backed by bassist Jason Sachs and Bell Witch’s Jesse Shreibman on drums—the Corpus Offal contingent, like maggots festering around a swollen corpse’s anal tract, fill the orifice of the USDM scene left gaping by CR’s demise. As suggested by their 2024 demo, similar influences have carried across to Corpus Offal’s self-titled debut—from Demilich and other Finnish nasties to the legendary Onward to Golgotha DM style and the rankness of pre-Heartwork era Carcass. Schwab’s Boman-esque guttural belch is wretched; on the churning, repulsive “Spinous

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Forms of Mortal Abhorrence,” he sounds like the toilet of serial killer Dennis Nilsen as it tries to swallow dismembered body parts.

His is a dominant performance, backed in rhythmic mania by Shreibman, who sounds possessed while away from funeral doom dirges. On “Essence of Dissolution” and “Gorging Gastric Decedent,” CO sound more intent on lodging sharp hooks in ears than CR were; while, conversely, the title track and the 12-minute purge of closer “Secreted Effluence (Spilling)” drag you to sulphuric depths through knotted riff transitions led by shuddering tempo shifts. —DEAN BROWN

DECREPISY

9

Deific Mourning CARBONIZED

Abyssic instinct

Put on the headphones, turn it up loud and dare yourself to absorb all the morbid detail in Kyle House’s Portland-based death-doom outfit’s lowend nightmare fuel. There is a lot of detail to be found, a lot of shadows in the mix. Deific Mourning is one of those albums that has you looking over your shoulder, has you swearing blind you heard something, something a bit off. Maybe you saw something, too. A face at the window.

House pulls together creative forces from the Acephalix/Vastum extended universe to realize his haunting vision. Vastum’s Daniel Butler is on the mic, with Leila Abdul-Rauf contributing synth/vocals.

It is not like Decrepisy’s superlative 2021 debut, Emetic Communion, was a work of sweetness and light, but Deific Mourning doubles down on the doom, doubles down on the vibe.

This is dense and three-dimensional, guitars as thick as treacle, all of it shaking from the bass underneath. The way Decrepisy will foreshadow or echo riffs with mewling highfrequency atonality gives House’s material subcutaneous reach, particularly on the tour de force title track.

But House and friends evidently have ambitions of going deeper, unleashing the pleasures of super-low, super-primal death riffs and Frankenstein grooves that move effectively but sound removed—or at least disinherited—from rock ‘n’ roll history to first pummel us physically before burrowing into the soul with the total-horror atmospherics, Jonathan Quintana’s lightning bolt guitar solos and sick melodic choices. “After Hours” deconstructs all the above to elevate what came before and close the album out, leaving you feeling as though the very air in the room has been befouled. Listen with the lights on. —JONATHAN HORSLEY 7 2 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

FINAL DOSE

7

Under the Eternal Shadow W O LV E S O F H A D E S

Pig on lipstick

Raw. Bestial. Primitive.

Lo-fi. These are a few of my least favorite things.

Early Darkthrone and Ulver? I’ll suffer through the sound for the songs. Vlad Tepes? Get the fuck away from me.

Judging music by its production value isn’t a best practice, but the heart hates what the heart hates. That’s why when Decibel’s esteemed editorin-chief passed Final Dose to me, I wondered if I was the right writer to review it. Well, there’s a reason why Albert does the assigning and I do the scribbling: The U.K. duo’s sophomore album, Under the Eternal Shadow, is the exact kind of black metal/punk hybrid that tingles my vagus nerve.

Final Dose delight in second-wave black metal’s most beloved tropes: wretched banshee vocals, tinny synthesizer intros, folksy interludes and, yes, a veil of hiss that gives the entire record a TASCAM demo, uh, charm.

Critically, though, much of that ravishing grimness is ornamentation. Beneath the frostbitten facade, they deploy pure, satisfying punk songs.

Their overdriven guitars buzz and sting like a swarm of hornets, but by and large, the riffs themselves are chunky power chord goodness laid over overdriven polka beats, with tremolo and blast beat segments blended throughout to maximize song dynamics. To be overly reductive, it’s GBH wearing a Gorgoroth suit, and I’m here for it.

Concise. Rhythmic. Memorable. These are a few of my favorite things, and Final Dose do all of them with gusto. I’d like Under the Eternal Shadow more if it didn’t sound like it was reamped through a blown-out laptop speaker, but the songs are so satisfying that I’m willing to look past it, and people who are into that sort of thing will probably love it. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

GATES TO HELL

4

Death Comes to All NUCLEAR BLAST

Some gates are better left closed

The use of artificial intelligence is antithetical to a band’s creative process. Nothing of artistic value is created by typing a prompt into a computer. The most generic, boring band in the world is, without question, preferable to anything AI. With that said, these principled declarations are easier to make when not listening to Death Comes to All by Gates to Hell.

What’s good? Well, it’s efficient. The Louisville band wastes little time blasting their death metal/hardcore amalgam across 10 tracks at barely over 20 minutes. Also, everything’s played well, and from a production standpoint it sounds pretty decent.

What’s bad? Well, this is brutally generic and boring. After multiple listens, there isn’t a single riff, idea or pick squeal that hasn’t had its vitality sucked dry. That’s not to say this stuff is bad, because to be bad it would have to stray from the inside-the-lines, safe-ashumanly-possible approach they’re taking. Even if you’re someone who binges this stuff, it’s hard to imagine what you would revisit. And the blandness even turns one of its strengths into a liability—the brevity of these songs means any space where an original or interesting idea would go has been abandoned to streamline this for utter forgettability.

Death Comes to All is absolutely not worse or just as bad as AI—there’s clearly something more rewarding going on here than what a computer can produce. But as that technology continues to advance, bands like Gates to Hell should be the ones worrying the most. —SHANE MEHLING

GRAVE INFESTATION

6

Carnage Gathers DARK DESCENT/ INVICTUS PRODUCTIONS

When infestations go wrong

Grave Infestation’s straight-no-chaser recipe is almost impossible to fuck up. Autopsy, Asphyx, Sarcófago and Master are just a few of the fetid fixins that the listener can expect to have Jackson Pollock-ed across their quivering sonic palette; and honestly, I’m just this side of crestfallen that I’m not experiencing lower back pain from genuflecting to Carnage Gathers’ profane glory.

Pros: a drummer who plays his cruddy heart out while nonchalantly bumbling every third fill; guitar leads that sound like Rick Rozz using a whammy bar to perform unanesthetized surgery on a horse; instruments that all sound disconcertingly out of tune… I mean, who’s horny here, huh?! This is basically the Panda Express of death metal.

More pros: Carnage Gathers has a killer, bootleg liquor/terrorist manifesto/willy-nilly vibe, as opposed to 2022’s more buttoned-up Persecution of the Living, which is much appreciated. It’s also gratifying that the record’s engineer had the good sense to lug the vocals out from the obfuscating murk in which they were regrettably

Misanthropik Torment

Releases The Most Controversial Album Of 2025 An album so intense it brought the secret service to the artists home Watch it all unfold here: https://youtu.be/p8AK2D6xs_c?si=wAZxPKWDm5170l1T Misanthropik Torment is:

Erik Leviathan: Vocals/Lyrics Aaron Moore: All Music on tracks 1, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Jacob Lizotte: All music on tracks 2, 4, 9, 10.

Jonathan R Nesbitt: All music on track 3 Label: SelfMadeRecords L.L.C. Digital Distributors: Earache records EDD.

Track List 1. Make Assassinations Great Again (MAGA) 2. Kill The Tyrant (VLADIMIR PUTIN) 3. Indigenous Lands 4. America Is a Fucking Disease 5. CLICK HATE 02:28 Show lyrics 6. This Is Why God Hates You 7. Deadly Aftermath 8. F@get 9. Spirit Crusher 10. 19 Children Dead! Fuck The Police!!

Album Credits:

Erik Leviathan: Vocals, lyrics, album theme and album art.

Aaron Moore: All music, additional vocals & lyrics Producer's: Erik Leviathan, Aaron Moore, and JP Braddock Digital Distributors Earache Records EDD. Misanthropik Torment For Fans Of: Lamb Of God, White Chapel & Cattle Decapitation Album: M.A.G.A. (Make Assassinations Great Again) Released on: 1/20/2025

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situated on the band’s previous release (though it’s a little bittersweet given the choice to launder them in obfuscating reverb). Guitarist/ vocalist Graham Christofferson has the kind of wounded snarl that would cause a minor deity to submissively piss themselves; check the 3:00 mark of “Ritualized Autopsy” or “Black Widow”’s killer Asphyx exultation at 2:30. Don’t try to gussy-up this shit-hammered pazuzu.

Let him cook!

But the inescapable issue with Carnage Gathers lies in its maddeningly prolix songcraft. Nothing here deserves to be any longer than the average track off The Return......, and yet they all drone on with Twilight of the Gods-level cockfidence. This violently blunts the album’s impact.

Mop up some of the reverb and treat your songs to the ol’ “back-alley bris,” and perhaps we’ll have a true contender by album number three.

—FORREST PITTS

IN THE WOODS…

7

Otra

PROPHECY PRODUCTIONS

Well-maintained park?

Norwegian avant-metal veterans In the Woods… have spent the better part of three decades in a state of perpetual reinvention. From their early black metal days (Heart of the Ages) to their progressive and experimental turns (Omnio, Strange in Stereo), every iteration of the band has felt like a recalibration—sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

Otra, their seventh full-length, finds them in a surprisingly melodic and structured headspace, leaning harder on clean vocals, rich atmospheres and traditional songcraft than ever before.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Opening track “The Things You Shouldn’t Know” sets the tone with its sweeping vocal lines and grand, Opethmeets-Borknagar aesthetic, while “The Crimson Crown” builds a slow-burning tension that pays off with surprisingly anthemic riffing.

The biggest surprise, though, is Bernt Fjellestad’s vocals—powerful, expressive and, at times, dangerously close to too polished for a band with this kind of legacy. The rougher edges of past albums are mostly sanded down, and while that gives Otra an air of maturity, it also strips away some of the mystique that made their earlier work so haunting. Given the lineup turbulence over the years, the fact that Otra sounds this cohesive and confident is almost more impressive than the music itself.

Like the river that inspired its name, the band has twisted and reformed through rocky terrain, yet still finds a way to flow forward. Fans hoping 74 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

for a callback to the band’s harsher past might be left wanting, but if you can accept Otra on its own terms—as an elegant, sprawling and deeply melodic record—it’s a rewarding listen. The river has smoothed the stones, but at least they still shimmer. —TIM MUDD

LIK

7

Necro M E TA L B L A D E

Not-so-foreign tongues

LIK is a Stockholm-based quartet featuring alumni of Katatonia, Bloodbath, Mefisto—pros one and all—whose name translates from Swedish as corpse(s). The album is titled Necro. You do the math. Better still, trust your every instinct that tells you these cats won’t let you down if you’re looking for a box-office horror-obsessed Swedeath LP that rides the backbeat hard and goes all-in gonzo with gnarly riffs and melodies that could have been seeded way back when Clandestine was at the pressing plant.

Vocalist/guitarist Tomas Åkvik admits as much—opening track “Deceased” is a direct homage. But so too is Chris Barkensjö’s snare drum sound, which echoes with such a boom you’d swear it was Nicke Andersson behind the kit, or that producer Lawrence Mackrory reached out to Tomas Skogsberg for advice on how to mic drums in a way that would best pulverize the audience’s inner ear.

Is Necro just Entombed, Grave and Dismember in a blender? Yes, no, maybe. Sure, LIK are steeped in that lineage, and can adroitly spin on a dime to drop a hardcore punk or death ‘n’ roll reference, or even a big cinematic setpiece riff that could have worked in the Amon Amarth practice room. Some will prefer a bit more gore in the mix. This thing is clean. Åkvik’s sore throat is right up in the mix. Some might want more surprises. The surprises are in the feel changes, the eccentricity; and so, even if there are a couple riffs you could secondguess, the next two might blindside you. And besides, all involved are having so much fun that you will, too. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

LO-PAN

6

Get Well Soon MAGNETIC EYE

Somewhere they belong

It was the most inescapable news story of 2024. One that even the most basement-dwelling degenerate couldn’t avoid unless they were living in a Faraday cage: Linkin Park got a new singer.

Bringing up the band behind Hybrid Theory is probably punishable by death in these pages, but hear me out: If the most successful arena rock band of this century can hire a young gun to replace their iconic, prematurely departed vocalist, then why couldn’t a band that’s actually good do the same? A band like Decibel Hall of Fame inductees Soundgarden?

Allow me to play armchair quarterback for a second: If Soundgarden were to reform, I can think of only two lead singer candidates. One is current Diamond Head frontman Rasmus Bom Andersen, whose voice is a dead ringer for Chris Cornell. That said, his NWOBHM vibe and inescapable Danishness don’t quite feel right.

The other, better candidate is Jeff Martin, singer of long-running desert rockers Lo-Pan. His voice is clear as a bell, but also soulful and subtle. Throughout Lo-Pan’s latest and most diverse record, Get Well Soon, he evokes wistfulness and melancholy like Sub Pop’s giants. Not to be outshined (pun intended), the musicians in Lo-Pan masterfully crank out both blustering biker riffs and songs suited to drinking red wine alone in a fit of nocturnal nostalgia. Why not get you a band that can do both?

One thing Lo-Pan don’t do is invoke the grimy toughness that added charm to my favorite records in their discography, Salvador and Colossus. Lo-Pan’s still the best-kept secret in stoner metal. However, their latest tunes are calibrated for massive festivals like Aftershock and Sonic Temple, which is precisely where they belong… playing direct support for Linkin Park. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

MALTUKA

8

Black Rite

HIGH ROLLER

Featuring ex-members of Psykopath: checks out

It wasn’t until after I spun Black Rite a couple of times that I read Maltuka’s bio. At which point I surprisingly discovered that not only are Maltuka straight outta Bergen, but they are Pampers-and-pacifiers years old, and this EP is their stone-cold debut. That the quartet had me assuming they were a veteran gang of gnashing, thrashing badgers was an unexpected gift and should be indicative of how well they stir and melt the likes of Deströyer 666, Sodom, Nuclear Assault, early Meshuggah and earlier Slayer into the influence pot, along with a mix of cobra piss and Red Bull.

In addition to this band making “Blood Sacrifice” and “Xolotl” sound like angrily dyeing the gray out of their beards is a hobby, “Condemnation” comes across as entirely manic and

D E C I B E L : M AY 2 0 2 5 : 7 5

one misinterpreted sidelong glance away from someone’s workplace being shot up. Maltuka’s alignment with brazen Latin and South American thrash—as well as lots of the off-the-rails, early-’90s Japanese goodness—is spectacular, and an encouraging option for jaded ears exhausted by impeccable technique and controlled chaos (read: safety).

On the other hand, it’s maybe not-so-spectacular for colleagues at wherever wild-and-wideeyed guitarist/vocalist Viljar Brunvoll holds down a job. Brunvoll’s multi-tiered vocalizations and shriek ‘n’ scream sounds like his face being torn off with the remains of his black heart and blacker soul being weaponized and catapulted from the Ian-Holm-as-Ash-sized gash in his neck.

Energetic, unhinged and totally awesome stuff!

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

MIZMOR & HELL

8

Alluvion

GILEAD MEDIA

A.L.N. + M.S.V. = A.O.K.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” If you were to apply this musing of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mizmor’s A.L.N. and Hell’s M.S.V. gotta be two of the greatest to have ever suffered on this festering shitpile; such is the melancholy of their music.

Longtime artistic conspirators, MizHell have taken their relationship to its most nihilistic conclusion. No, no, not a death pact. They’ve instead collaborated on what will be one of Gilead Media’s final releases, Alluvion. This LP is best considered as one composition split into four sections; “Visions I and II,” listed as tracks two and four, conjoin the other two pieces. The former’s clarion guitars rise like noxious smoke from an incinerator, while the latter’s doomlurch plays out like if Sleep swapped sativa for more malevolent substances.

Sixteen-minute opener “Begging to be Lost,” however, really highlights the chemistry between these two players. Beginning with Pallbearer-esque harmonized guitars, the solemnity collapses into deep, thunderous sludge and carcinogenic bass drones, accented by the shrieks and roars of an open wound. The use of restraint, value imparted upon space, and the shrewd timing when it comes to transitions— from the funereal to Warning-worthy yearning—is indicative of two seasoned craftsmen.

The brilliantly titled “Pandemonium’s Throat” is even more wretchedly bleak. Until black metal blasts forth, its lumbering swallows light. Like 7 6 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

Mizmor’s 2022 collaboration with Thou, Alluvion is a purge of suffering from two (troubled) souls.

—DEAN BROWN

PYRAMID MASS

8

Gargling Rot OSSIEN

Wild at heart

This skull-rattling Richmond, VA trio presents a twisted paradox—defying concise description while cramming everything they do into the neatest, most compact packages. After releasing the eight-minute Demon Stration—which Metal Archives slyly classifies as an EP rather than a demo—they dropped the 11-minute Spewtrid in 2020 (both under the moniker Doubtfire), and even their full-length 2023 debut, Monolith, slides in under the 30-minute mark. These guys are not interested in wasting your time, a fact that shines through every second of their music.

Pound for pound, Pyramid Mass are the best thing I’ve heard in months.

If you did want a tidy 80-second summary of Gargling Rot’s strengths, though, you could do worse than the final third of centerpiece “Abhorrent Passage,” which tattoos its shimmering synth chords with a maelstrom of continuous, unforgiving drum blasts and clamps down on all of it with a rabid, growling bass barrage. Guitarist Nick Crider and bassist Joey Anderson are talented players who ensure that every element of this music stands out, but the MVP here has to be Matt Wild on drums and vocals. Those drum hits are bent on utter ear destruction, and their consistent savagery does more damage in these 18 minutes than many albums can muster in three times that long.

In just a few slim recordings, Pyramid Mass have proven their mastery of mathy noise, obsidian death sludge, scintillating synth atmospheres and everything in between. What say we throw these dudes some money and see what they can do with some real wind in their sails?

—DANIEL LAKE

SKIN YOU ALIVE

7

Degenerate Death CORPSE GRISTLE

Degens from downcountry

A brisk wind rolling trash cans like tumbleweed down a deserted street. Overflowing sewers gurgling human waste and glowing the color of radiation. Razor blades being dragged across the loose fillings of Jaws’ Quint as he drags his fingernails down a chalkboard. A moose and Bigfoot

wrestling over a Ziploc bag of coke covered in meth sprinkles. These are a few of the vivid and calamitous metaphors that Skin You Alive’s debut EP (de)generate over the course of its quartet of songs. An appropriate visualization would involve something about maggots being stomped, but since Maggot Stomp, the label, has cornered that market, it’d be too easy to throw out comparisons involving maggots and stomping, even though Skin You Alive hail from the maggotstomping end of death metal spectrum.

Adherence to caveman philosophies is alive and well with these North Carolinians as they trip over their own dragged knuckles. Tempo changes from super-slow to punky blasts are so compartmentalized that, at first blush, the breakdown in “Chaos Submits to None” seemed like the beginning of a new song. Their signature tune (“Skin You Alive”) drags overseas heroes Both Thrower and Haemorrhage through some southern slime, whereas the oscillation between fast and phlegmatic in “Laid in Earth” hops, skips and jumps like Johnny Hedlund fluffing an Autopsy/Obituary/Six Feet Under daisy chain that’s undoubtedly death metal through and through, to the end, to the death!

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

SUMAC & MOOR MOTHER

7

The Film

THRILL JOCKEY

Were the Body busy?

If this collaboration seems out of nowhere, consider the fact that New Jersey noise-rap veterans dälek were regular tourmates and remix partners of choice for Isis in the early ’00s. Cut to the present day and Isis frontman Aaron Turner is deconstructing his old band’s monolithic sounds through noise and improvisation in Sumac, while dälek’s iconoclastic approach to hip-hop has taken root with a new generation of weirdos like Blackie, Fatboi Sharif and Moor Mother, who’s spent her career prowling the outskirts of underground rap, free jazz and spoken word. Think of this Film as a spiritual sequel to that era of shows and remixes, or maybe the soundtrack to a fuckedup surrealist nightmare of an imaginary Judgment Night remake.

The result of this team-up, an hour of heavy, abstract music and dense poetry, is a lot to take in. Violence, death, and erasure lurk in every corner of Moor Mother’s lyrics, countered by exhortations to survive and resist; these are frequently delivered as primal phrases like “I was running” and “don’t look away,” repeated like mantras with increasing force. The first half of

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The first new album in 11 years from one of noise-rock’s most important bands is every bit as shocking and intense as anything the influential trio has ever made.

The Australian sax & drums duo return with a heavy dose of law and disorder on a feral new album that intuitively blends no-wave, funk, shoegaze, and noise rock.

The first new album in seven years from the instrumental icons is a loud, dramatic, wild rumination on life and death. It is simultaneously their quietest and most crushingly loud album to date.

The new album by Scottish underground rock legends is a core of darkness held up by a transcendent lift that only this iconic group can achieve.

The surprise new album by one of the world’s best out-rock bands goes back to their beginnings, and in the process delivers easily the best album of their brilliant career.

The entire recorded history of one of the foundational pieces of early 1990s post-hardcore is restored and remastered after being unavailable for over 25 years.

The legendary composer unearths a mystifying meditation on empathy and melancholy originally recorded in 1982 and finally completed in 2024.

The legendary Japanese experimental rock band returns with their 12th and most contemplative allbum, produced by longtime friend and collaborator, Steve Albini.

The long out-of-print lone album from one of the most influential and innovative hardcore punk bands of all time gets a brilliant reissue with restored artwork.

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“Scene 2,” anchored by the steady throb of Brian Cook’s bass, deserves the title “J’Nuh” more than that Sunny Day Real Estate song, while the latter half erupts into full-bore death metal. “Camera” shows Sumac at their noisiest and most aggressive, with Moor Mother matching their intensity until she sounds spent, and samples from news reports add another layer of chaos.

The Film is a grim and demanding listen, but if you need a tidy narrative arc or a happy ending, you could do worse than an album that starts with the declaration “I want my breath back” and ends with a song titled “Breathing Fire.”

—ANTHONY BARTKEWICZ

WOMBBATH

7

Beyond the Abyss P U LV E R I S E D

Throwing Swedish meatballs

Swedish death metal band Wombbath go way back—their formation dates to when their countrymates Entombed recorded the death metal classic Left Hand Path. Wombbath never received the same notoriety or accolades, but in fairness, few others did outside of Dismember. Wombbath stopped recording in the mid-’90s, and there wasn’t a peep until Downfall Rising in 2015. The band has been very active since then; although, like most longstanding death metal bands, the current roster doesn’t resemble the lineup from a decade ago.

While they aren’t a household name for Swedish death metal fans, principal songwriter and guitarist Håkan Stuvemark and his new Wombbath crew are doing fine work circa 2025. Stuvemark says the current lineup might be the most cohesive ever, and the teamwork shows. Beyond the Abyss is a solid meat-and-potatoes Swedish death metal album that checks all the boxes for genre fans. No new ground is broken, and that’s a good thing. The focus is where it should be: Keep the songs compact, clench your jaw and drop the fucking hammer on the listeners. Beyond the Abyss sounds like vintage Asphyx with more ornamentation at its best moments.

The only knock on the album is that ornamentation. It’s exciting when Wombbath bear down and give us oodles of brutals. The title track is a nearly flawless death metal song with a big tone and undeniable presence. Some classical interludes are well-executed, but don’t need to be there. If you can cook a fucking great burger, we don’t need a souffle. Give us the down-low and a few solos and we’re good. That said, meat-andpotatoes death metal fans will want to dig in.

Toss some of the sides and focus on those bulging Swedish meatballs. —JUSTIN M. NORTON 7 8 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

DIRE HOLLOW

EVIL DECEIVER

R . A . M . P R O PA G A N D A

ZOMBI DANZ

Black.Sludge.Profanation Nothing better than stumbling on a new den of psychopaths playing metal in the most extreme and caustic ways possible. In this case, the den was R.A.M. (Ringing Abrasive Misanthropy) Propaganda. Piqued by their band name and the pedigree of their demo’s uploader, I found Dire Hollow and their demo to be well worth my time and money.

Dragging a bestial sludge into the light of day couldn’t have been easy, but Dire Hollow seem to have delighted in these violent acts.

A demo at turns heavy and despondent, at others blistering and ferocious: like Eyehategod playing At the Devil’s Studio 1990 with an absolutely terrifying production that feels like you’re right there with them.

Evil Deceiver

Here’s a ridiculously obscure demo (with an impending reissue, thankfully!) of American black/death perfectly done in the early West Coast style à la Demoncy, Morbosidad, Von. Too heavy to be called raw, but by no means polished, Evil Deceiver’s self-titled four-track debut is obscenely bestial with a killer bass-forward mix. Taking the demo’s artwork and the band’s logo, both executed by Goatprayer of Witchcraft (Finland), Evil Deceiver simply nail it from the start. The energy never once lets up, and in 22 minutes, Evil Deceiver prove they’re not some shallow throwback band. Whoever they are, they went straight to the source and came back possessed.

SHÃHANSHÃH

DEATH PULSATION

LUCIFEROUS CRUOR

CALIGARI

Kamãn Va Anãr Kamãn Va Anãr is the debut recording of Shãhanshãh, an anonymous Iranian-American black metal band. Although the name Shãhanshãh translates to “Emperor,” this demo sounds more like USBM—at least compositionally. The scales used to build these riffs are not of your typical minor or diminished variety. This isn’t some superficial nod to Arabic culture. Every aspect of this project exudes Middle Eastern vibes. From the Farsi to the pomegranate on the back of the J-card, this stuff is authentic as it is refreshing. Check this out, do a bit of research, and find your knowledge of the world enriched while enjoying some extremely novel and indubitably sick black metal.

ILLUSTRATUS Illustratus

SELF-RELEASED

Fans of Baltimore’s Scum Sedition probably won’t see this slab of psychedelic funeral doom coming from half the members of that seemingly erstwhile death/doom operation, but they should seek it out all the same.

Chiseled down to a mere trio, Illustratus play doom the way statues walk. That is, incredibly slow and only in lengthy trippy episodes. Seriously, though, this demo and its two songs, both of which exceed 10 minutes, should have way more people talking.

Vibes pointing to Mournful Congregation and Thergothon are pretty obvious, but it’s ultimately the purely Illustratus moments— the slowly dueling guitars, the overall improvisational nature of the recording, not to mention the compositions themselves—that make this demo stand out like a black marble colossus amidst a snowstorm.

Death Pulsation

This self-titled debut from Swedish quartet Death Pulsation is a highly explosive demonstration of rabid and arcane black/ death performed in the vein of early Morbid Angel, Sadistic Intent or contemporaries Abhorration. Composed of players from the vicious black metal group Malakhim and violent OSDM manglers Encryptment, Death Pulsation’s sound comes off as both naturally formed and supernaturally aggressive. These are experienced underground extreme metal musicians, no doubt, but they also approached this three-track demo in total Berserker mode, blood-drunk and giddy with their own tightly controlled prowess.

SPELL CASTER

The Fourth Pentacle of Saturn ELF EGGS

Over the course of their so-far four-year existence, I’ve come to think of Spell Caster as the American Black Cilice. Like Black Cilice, Spell Caster deals in esoteric and atmospheric black metal that borders on dark ambient.

Like Black Cilice, Spell Caster’s black metal is exceedingly, gatekeepingly raw.

There are a few bands that click after a few minutes (or years) of exposure, and Spell Caster is at the forefront of this delayed-reward type of black metal.

Spell Caster is also the work of a sole individual, Blood, who lurks behind such projects as Zygmythkaupt, Eternal Octagon, etc. A release through Elf Eggs was inevitable, given both entities’ dedication and hyper-prolificacy, but still, a pleasant surprise. Get it while you can.

by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

WATCHING DEAFHEAVEN…

NAKED SAN

Francisco is a small city. You wouldn’t go wrong even, calling it a town. Seven miles across, the more ambitious can actually walk across it. But size can be deceiving, or at least I am routinely deceived by it. Mostly in the belief that, by virtue of the fact that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I know everything about what goes on in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This is how young turks become old guys, though, and so it happened that I had started to notice stuff was getting by me. Bands that I had never heard of, everyone else seems to have heard of, and this would not stand.

“Deafheaven?”

“Yeah. They’re pretty good. Come on out with us. We’re going to see them play.”

It was a fruitless phone call to make. After years of being in bands, actually going to see bands, if you are not playing, might feel like work. Bands on the come-up may realize this, and so had started to invite me to shows. Which was how 8 0 : M AY 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

I met and first saw Dillinger Escape Plan, Isis, Palms, A Perfect Circle (well, they asked us to play with them, which works, too) and maybe even Amenra, too.

I didn’t go, and even after hearing what kind of good gloriousness I had missed, this was also filtered through critics that had used words to describe them that I had often heard, behind our backs, to describe us. Mostly that they were “jocks”? Which was never a knock for me since I am, in actual fact, a bodybuilding Brazilian jiu jitsuplaying lunatic.

So, the hook was in. This and a design sensibility that made their mating with Deathwish perfect— almost too perfect. And they were from San Francisco, too? Missing them had now seemed almost criminal, but I’m OK with me being a criminal, too, though.

“This your thing I’m sitting on?”

I was at the Amplifest in Porto, Portugal. Clustered backstage with the rest of Buñuel. It seems like, in remembering this, that we had already played. Something I feel safe

in saying since I was nearly nude.

It could, of course, have been before we played, but I was sweaty, so it seemed after was much more likely.

The guy I was talking to didn’t seem bothered. A little nervous, not because of me it seemed, but a little edgy. When someone else came from the stage area and asked him for something, I had noticed in the wan way that he offered “help” with sort of a performative wave that he was part of my tribe, and I said so.

“Singer!”

“Yes!” “We need a union, as it took a lot to master the art of almost seeming to help move equipment without actually moving any equipment!”

He laughed, and we chatted idly before he said that he had to get onstage. So, I had to ask someone else who that was.

“Oh. Deafheaven. From San Francisco.”

Which was all I needed to hustle to the side stage so I could watch them and hear what all of the hubbub was about, bub. The lights

died, the band ripped into their first song, and the guy who I had figured for a singer and who was, in actual fact, really the singer, started singing.

And it was a glorious din, and dressed in black against what seemed to be the silver of the stage lighting, they laid to rest a secretly long-held opinion of mine that San Francisco hadn’t turned out any music worth a good goddamn in the last 20 years. Both physical and smooth, he muscled through about four songs, which was right about the time I had remembered that I was still wearing nothing but underwear.

Nearly naked and enjoying Deafheaven. I don’t know if that is the ideal way to enjoy them. I just know that I did. I also didn’t see the rest of the set, as I headed off to get dressed, but I am convinced, no matter what happens, that the singer, whose name I find out is George, is off somewhere killing it and pretending to help load equipment. That is following the singer’s credo to a tee.

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