Decibel #248 - June 2025

THE ENDING GOREMENT QUEST

KYLESA CUTTING THE TENSIONS

BEHEMOTH FORGET ME NOT

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WITCHCRAFT THE AUSTERITY PROGRAM AHAMKARA DECREPISY WRATH OF LOGARIUS ANCIENT DEATH WITHERER PYRAMIDS

JUNE 2025 // No. 248

EXTREMELY EXTREME

June 2025 [R 248] decibelmagazine.com

upfront 8

metal muthas Unquestionable presence

features 12 ahamkara Lost and found

10 low culture Louder than words

14 the austerity program New testament

11 kill screen:

16 pyramids 70,000 reggaetons of metal

wrath of logarius Death is death

22 behemoth Somebody should tell Nergal what happens when you turn over 5318008 on a calculator 24 witchcraft Cat scratch fever

18 decrepisy Through sickness and in hell 20 witherer The shadow of death

reviews 26 q&a: kylesa Following Kylesa’s return, Laura Pleasants tunes up her sound 30 the decibel

hall of fame Swedish death outfit Gorement may have ended before they began, but things may not truly be over for cult classic album The Ending Quest

55 lead review Tribunal continue down the long and winding road to doom glory with sophomore offering In Penitence and Ruin 56 album reviews Records from bands that prefer their government briefs on Snapchat, including Candlemass, Melvins 1983 and Planning for Burial 64 damage ink Hawk tuah birds

Fanning the Flames of Contentment 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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June 2025 [T248] PUBLISHER

Alex Mulcahy

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian

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tim@redflagmedia.com CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Decibel has published 215 issues

since Pelican last appeared on the cover of the magazine. That’s 18 years.

You—well, let’s be honest, some of you—could have co-produced a fullygrown adult from scratch in the time it has taken us to revisit our favorite instrumental metal band in longform format. In fact, it’s the longest break between covers for any artist in the magazine’s 21-year history.

Obviously, a lot has happened to our fine feathered friends since issue #33 hit then-existing newsstands at a heady time when we believed Myspace, JaMarcus Russell’s NFL career and the Britney/K-Fed marriage would last forever. Consider that it’s been so long since their last Decibel cover that one of Pelican’s founding members, guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, left the band for an entire decade and returned three years ago.

It’s new LP Flickering Resonance, though, which marks the full-length recording reunion with the band’s classic, original lineup of SchroederLebec, guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw and the bass/drummer/ brother tandem of Bryan and Larry Herweg. In Daniel Lake’s extensive cover story interviews with each of them, it’s clear that the traditional upheavals around lineup and label changes that occur over a band’s lifespan are perhaps the least interesting part of the Pelican narrative.

Instead, it’s that multi-decade process of balancing the demands of non-endemic careers and starting families while still making time to pursue the art that helped shape you two decades prior. For SchroederLebec, in particular, he had to step away in order to be in a better position when he eventually returned. When he did, that chemistry between the four of them that helped make Pelican one of the most beloved bands of Decibel’s foundational years was still very much in place, despite the musicians’ profound evolution of their crafts.

That, and the return to their triumphant sound on Flickering Resonance, both made the decision to break our 18-year Pelican coverless streak such an easy one. Oh, and who could forget that Pelican’s first cover appearance marked the introduction of the current Decibel logo?

Does that mean the old-school distressed dB scribble will adorn next month’s cover? Maybe. As Pelican have proven, sometimes you can go home again. albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

Chuck BB, Ed Luce Mark Rudolph

Online DECIBEL WEB EDITOR

Albert Mudrian

DECIBEL WEB AD SALES

James Lewis

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Anthony Bartkewicz Emily Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Liz Ciavarella-Brenner Chris Dick Sean Frasier Nick Green Raoul Hernandez John Hill Jonathan Horsley Neill Jameson Kim Kelly Greg Kennelty Sarah Kitteringham Daniel Lake Cosmo Lee Jamie Ludwig Shane Mehling Tim Mudd Justin M. Norton Dutch Pearce Forrest Pitts Brad Sanders José Carlos Santos Joseph Schafer Kevin Stewart-Panko Eugene S. Robinson Adem Tepedelen Jeff Treppel Aris Hunter Wales J Andrew Zalucky CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

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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.

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READER OF THE

MONTH My main favorite subgenres of metal are prog, thrash and death metal, along with all things doom.

What’s the one record or item that has eluded you?

Rob Kachluba Hamilton, Ontario

You boast one of the most impressive collections of metal records and memorabilia that I have ever seen, simply dubbed “The Shrine.” When did you first start collecting records, and when was it clear that your collection was growing to the size of a large record store or small museum?

I started collecting as a teenager when I still lived in Regina, Saskatchewan. My first foray into vinyl was walking into Music Plus in my hometown and buying the first two Mötley Crüe albums, Manowar’s Battle Hymns and Virgin Steele’s Guardians of the Flame.

Back in the early ’80s, music magazines were the only resource for finding out about bands and albums. I started buying Metal Forces with issue #2 and found out about the self-titled Metal Church album and I ordered Jag Panzer’s Ample Destruction via World Metal Report after reading about it there, too.

One of the main reasons I moved east to Ontario from Saskatchewan—outside of work

6 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

opportunities—was because there was such a vibrant metal scene in Toronto. Just to show what a maniac I was: It was only my second day living in Ontario and I drove into Toronto’s Rock and Roll Heaven club, a famous iconic live music bar, and I asked some greasy-haired lads where to buy metal in Toronto. I was told I needed to go down to the Record Peddler on Carleton Street in Toronto, across from Maple Leaf Gardens. Fast forward five days later; I am at the Peddler getting my first two Death Angel LPs signed and my picture taken with the band as they were doing an in-store before playing the next night with Rigor Mortis. All in my first week!

Around the turn of the millennium, my collection started to get really serious, especially with picture discs. I now have over 330 picture discs, 232 different box sets and over 1,900 LPs in my collection. All of which is metal. When we decided to build a new house, I told my wife she could do what she wanted with the main floor, but I wanted to dedicate the basement to my metal collection.

I still want to find an original 1984 Black Mark label pressing of the first Bathory LP with the yellow-colored goat on the cover—not a bootleg one, but the original that sells for thousands.

What does your wife think of a floor of your home dedicated to all of this?

My wife has no issues with my music collection. She knows it’s my passion, but for some unknown reason she actually thinks my shrine is too crowded—HA! To be honest, I feel my shrine looks amazing due to the time invested in setting it up to display everything. I try to use the 1,900 square feet of my basement to my full advantage. I am now even going into the cat/furnace room with my CDs and flags. My wife is concerned that soon the collection will be coming up the stairs…

My collection is decent, but I have pals with far superior record collections with lots of original pressings and many other musical genres included. I just focus on metal and my love of box sets and picture discs. But again, it is down to the display that makes the “wow” factor.

I work hard, I play hard and I love my metal collection. It’s my big passion in life.

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 accidentally texted to the Atlantic.

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

This Month’s Mutha: Michelle Witunsky Mutha of Jerry Witunsky of Ancient Death

Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m a wife to a wonderful and loving man, and a most proud mom of Jerry and his sister, Abby.

These relationships are the most important thing to me in life. I’m also a serious live music addict, have loads of hobbies, and have spent my professional life serving and supporting vulnerable populations. I’m currently teaching teenagers with complex trauma and complicated disabilities.

Ancient Death’s debut LP was the lead review in last month’s issue and earned a 9 out of 10 rating. Did Jerry receive any accolades that compare to that as a young man?

His father and I are both avid live music fans and put him next to as many musicians as possible, so he got a lot of support and accolades pretty early on. A highlight was when he played a local venue in Boston that I frequented regularly, and his former band Garroted opened up for a sold-out Gorguts show when he was like 16.

He wouldn’t have even been able to get into that venue otherwise, he was so young. All night, the whole audience was talking about how they killed it, and had an incredible energy and guitar riffs that were really impressive.

That album, Ego Dissolution, deals with “depression, love, grief, personal growth, death [and] inner peace.” Was Jerry always this in touch with his emotions?

Jerry has always been a deeply feeling kid, and fortunately for all of us, he was able to harness and express that through his music. He grew 8 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

up with carte blanche to learn, play [and] hone his craft, and always had a guitar in hand. I often had to negotiate with the neighbors on volume and such, but there was always music being played, which I think saved him during really difficult times for our family and in his younger life.

Jerry also plays in death metal legends Atheist.

How has he handled so much success before age 30?

Well Jerry is an incredibly humble guy. He also wants to make music as his livelihood, and even when he was a teenager, he developed an ethic and a professionalism to everything he does. He takes nothing for granted and makes sure every detail of every song, album, show, and personal interaction is very intentional and authentic.

It also helps that Kelly Shaefer and the entire Atheist band are just the most wonderful and kind individuals in their own right.

What’s something that Ancient Death fans would never suspect about your son?

While Jerry is a prolific lover of all kinds of music, and in his heart and core he is an underground metalhead and savage through and through, he actually cut his teeth in the hippie jam band music scene. When Jerry was really young, we started going to Strangecreek and Wormtown, a small New England jam band festival every Memorial Day weekend and after Labor Day. Basically starting at age 8, he would find the most highly trafficked spot and just play guitar with his case open. —ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Tribunal, In Penitence and Ruin  Gorement, The Ending Quest  Pelican, Flickering Resonance  Conan, Violence Dimension  Acid Bath, Demos 1993-1996 ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Uniform Choice, Screaming for Change  Inside Out, Inside Out  Beastie Boys, Ill Communication  Helmet, Meantime  Nirvana, Nevermind ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Gorement, The Ending Quest  Wrath of Logarius, Crown of Mortis  Eric W. Brown, Sea of Stars Original Soundtrack  Krieg, Transient  SpiritWorld, Helldorado ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Rainbowdragoneyes, Uentitled  Nekrogoblikon, The Fundamental Slimes and Humours  Krieg, Ruiner  Pelican, Flickering Resonance  Trauma Bond, Winter’s Light

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Cierra White : OA K, A S H & TH ORN  Cradle of Filth, Nymphetamine  Cradle of Filth, Godspeed on the Devil’s Thunder  Cradle of Filth, Bitter Suites to Succubi  Cradle of Filth, Hammer of the Witches  Cradle of Filth, The Manticore and Other Horrors

Bloodborne [FROM SOFTWARE/SONY]

URATH OF

A Modest Proposal lot of what I do as a writer these days

seems to be less about the sort of shit I started with—mostly speaking out against what I saw as bullshit behaviors within the music scene—and more just ramblings about music itself. The odd thread that connects the last decade-plus of my writing is the consistent confusion within the internet on whether to consider me woke or a right-leaning NS sympathizer. These labels tend to switch depending on whoever’s mad at me on what day.

It’s like that in my personal life, too.

I’ve also drawn the ire of some larger institutions through my writing, resulting in my being unwelcome in certain subjects unless I were to do them on my own time. I’ve recently had someone say it was “okay” that a band I was in was bootlegged against the band’s wishes because I wrote for Vice at one time. Joke’s on them—it took a year of threats before Vice paid me.

But mostly I’ve settled into writing about records and bands, telling stories, occasionally going on podcasts, generally writing what I want to write about without really being concerned with “branding” myself or losing whatever following I’ve picked up. In my 30 years as a musician, I’ve lost my fanbase on at least two occasions, never fully recovering from the first time.

But that’s all okay; it’s a part of the journey.

This attitude hasn’t won me any friends, or at least not very many. Neither will this: For those of you still thinking that all the fun Elon is having while trying to get somebody to actually like him is somehow doing good for the world, then fuck off. For every one of you constantly talking about the fucking Epstein 10 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

list, you do know your boy is on there, right?

They were fucking pals, probably in a few different senses. Christ, the cognitive dissonance is astounding. These people do not have your best interest at heart. And it’s already starting to fuck up tours, labels and probably a slew of other things that you swear you live for. The fact so many people in punk and metal have become a somehow less sexually arousing version of The 700 Club would be perplexing if it wasn’t so goddamn sad.

Folks on the left, don’t think I’ve forgotten you either. How’s that not voting to protest the shitty White House reaction to Gaza going? Those of you who are a bit more moderate, how’s keeping Chuck and Nancy in power going? Those people don’t give a fuck about you either.

So, what are you doing about it? Because going after bands for label affiliations, or someone you saw in a Burzum shirt, or a promoter who booked someone who was once in a car with someone listening to a Goatmoon record on their AirPods might feel good and maybe even get you laid, but it’s doing fuck-all to move the needle.

Being obsessed with trivial shit isn’t going to somehow help your trans friends not be petrified that they’re going to be fired on for having to shit somewhere, or help someone who needs an abortion because carrying the kid to term will kill both them and their unborn. Your priorities are performative garbage masked as activism.

I’ve seen so many petulant fucks say this attitude is “boomer” shit. Awesome. How about shutting the fuck up until you do something helpful besides getting a questionable record banned from Discogs?

WRATH OF LOGARIUS WON’T BE TRAPPED UNDER GAMING’S SHADOW

feature rather than a bug, the

storylines from FromSoftware’s acclaimed action role-playing can be generously described as opaque.

Even a lifelong gamer could go from start to finish through their popular Soulsborne series (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring) and have no clear idea as to what exactly happened, or even why. Instead, in-game notes, context clues and a heaping dose of speculation have cultivated a massive community of word-of-mouth interpretations surrounding the lore of these games. It’s this subjective, murky storytelling that proved to be the environment for formless black metal progenitors Wrath of Logarius to thrive.

Named after an optional boss in the cosmic horror one-off Bloodborne, this fusion of black and death metal seeks to emulate not the sound, but the spirit of FromSoft’s PS4 masterpiece, as explained by founding guitarist Urath. The name certainly piqued the interest of Decibel’s resident nerds, but the truth is that there’s nothing specifically video game-y about Wrath of Logarius.

Pagan Altar “Never Quite Dead” DVP 327 - LP/CD/MC

Another doom metal classic, including songs that were originally composed

by Terry Jones before his passing.

Pagan Altar “Psychodrome” DVP 328 - LP/CD/MC

Austria’s upstarts return with a confident, 2nd album - filled to the brim with fantastic heavy metal hits!

Hyena “About Rock And Roll” DVP 329 - LP/CD

The Peruvians keep the spirit of heavy metal alive with their traditional, adrenaline drenched 80s sound.

The Riven “Visions Of Tomorrow” DVP 330 - LP/CD

I think that the style that we play, our vibe is able to transcend

WHETHER IT’S A BLOODBORNE THING OR NOT. There’s no chiptune, no heavy-handed references, no cheeky winks to the camera—just ripping blackened death metal that feels right at home among the Season of Mist roster. Ahead of their debut LP Crown of Mortis, the skull-faced guitarist shares his thoughts on why their horror is anything but a jump scare.

We’re seeing—thanks in large part to the FromSoft ARPGs—this idea that video games are cool. It’s about as strange to say that you play something like a FromSoft game as it would be to say that you watched a horror movie. Do you have any hope that having a band named after a FromSoft character will be seen less as “They’re a band named after a video game character,” and more “They’re named after a fictional character”? Do you see this kind of growing acceptance within underground metal as a whole, or is there still this weird divide in terms of credibility of literature versus video games?

I think a lot of people, especially metalheads, are more open to it. I think it used to be gimmicky maybe 20 years ago. You’d have bands be called

Nintendocore, from what I remember. It sounds like a gimmick. It sounds like something that wouldn’t really last too long. I’m not sure if it’s still around, but that’s what comes to mind. And then over time, I think you kind of landed where it’s at, where it’s been more widely accepted and adopted for a bunch of different bands. I’ll see other types of Bloodborne bands online that’ll follow us and I’ll check them out. I’ll follow them, too. But I’ve noticed that, especially with Bloodborne and Dark Souls stuff, it’s really taken on its own type of thing.

It certainly doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down. You imagine that it’ll probably only pick up more steam as time goes on, yeah?

Right. And I think that the style that we play, our vibe is able to transcend whether it’s a Bloodborne thing or not. I think we’ll be okay surviving if we were to have to play with some really heavy, brutal death metal bands. It would be all right. And I don’t think that the crowd would really take any second guess as to whether or not we’re Bloodborne-related or not. I think the style lets itself blend in a little better.

CONTINUE AT DECIBELMAGAZINE.COM PHOTO BY DAVID GRAVELLE

The Swedes’ 3rd album portrays varied 70s influenced heavy rock built on massive hooks and heart.

April 25

th

rd MAY 23

Sexmag “Sexorcyzm” DVP 331 - LP/CD

The rotting corpse from Silesia sharpens its axe and spits out its 1st album. Thrashing proto-black metal for the possessed.

Fly! “...Or Die!” DVP 332 - LP/CD

This fast and mean rock ‘n’ roll debut album emerges from the darkest depths of the Aussie wastelands!

Hellcrash “Inferno Crematörio” DVP 333 - LP/CD

Album #3 sees the speed metal horde more refined and streamlined than ever, without leaving rawness and filth behind.

Animalize “Verminateur” DVP 334 - LP/CD

The tongue-in-cheek shock-rockers are finally back with their 2nd full length This time all-French lyrics.

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AHAMKARA

AHAMKARA

Amidst constant threat, atmospheric black metallers are their own stabilizing force

THE

central theme of the album is grief. It was my defining experience of the last 10 years.” ¶ So says multi-instrumentalist Michael Blenkarn of atmospheric black metal outfit Ahamkara.

Indeed, the decade that followed 2014 debut The Embers of the Stars has been fraught. Less than a year after its release, vocalist Steve Black tragically passed away. ¶ “It was the first time I’ve had that experience [where] somebody who was a close friend and a peer,” says Blenkarn. “It was a confrontation with mortality that I hadn’t dealt with before and I wasn’t prepared for. It just rewrote the whole world.” ¶ As he struggled to cope with the loss of his friend and artistic collaborator, the world simultaneously was further destabilized by Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, a global pandemic and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. ¶ “It was a very transformative thing and a paradigm shift,” Blenkarn continues. “And then there was the absolute clusterfuck of the following years. Things seemed sure, strong and stable.

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[The new album] documents a time between a world that [was] stable and reliable and where you know what you want, and total anxiety and constant risk and a sense of threat.”

Lovingly embraced by the community that revolved around Ahamkara’s label, Bindrune Recordings, Blenkarn eventually reconvened, taking over vocal duties in addition to guitar. He was bolstered by the gentle encouragement and addition of drummer Austin Lunn—also the man behind highly celebrated American atmospheric black metal band Panopticon—and his now wife, British synth player Alexandra Blenkarn-Durning of Nemorous.

“That night when we were all together, it was snowing really hard and it was really cold,” Lunn says of a fateful evening in the United States that cemented his inclusion into Ahamkara. “We were all piled up in my living room with the fire,

and passing the horn around and baring our souls. It was a really intense bonding experience.”

The final result of the bonding and trauma is The Harrow of the Lost.

Raw, ferocious and morose, the four-track album effortlessly combines elements of Cascadian and Scandinavian black metal. Elevated

by Lunn’s frantic and ballistic drumming alongside BlenkarnDurning’s evocative synths, the album is an auditory expulsion of grief. Importantly, it’s simultaneously a love letter to Black and the community that rallied around Blenkarn following Black’s sudden passing.

“I feel more grounded in small communities of mutual responsibility and mutual respect,” concludes Blenkarn, who is flanked on our call by his bandmates. “That kind of connection is much more meaningful than the accident of birth.”

—SARAH KITTERINGHAM

THE AUSTERITY PROGRAM

NYC duo’s newest testament to noise rock may be their heaviest

W

e’re past the point of asking ourselves what we’re supposed to be doing. I think we fucked up ‘supposed to be’ a long time ago.” ¶ Justin Foley has no illusions about how the Austerity Program functions. The guitarist/vocalist, bassist Thad Calabrese and their trusty drum machine show up sporadically to drop an incredible new noise rock record (or play some very loud shows), then fade into the background to live their normal lives. This is how they’ve functioned for almost 30 years, making each appearance or new release almost divine intervention. And the latest miracle is their EP Bible Songs 2. ¶ “It’s a good thing we’ve been around so long or else we’d have no catalog,” Foley says, admitting that this sequel to Bible Songs 1 came from their decision to put out two short records rather than a long one. An attempt to speed up the release process, the follow-up still took six years to write and record.

“Every time I tell myself the next one’s going to happen faster, 14 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

but in terms of the creative process, for some reason we just make it harder for ourselves.”

A band writing roughly a song a year may lead you to believe that the resulting music is bursting with complex, intertwining prog-rock melodies and guest synth players; instead, the Austerity Program have focused on sprinting in the opposite direction.

“For the last record, we were trying to be more atonal, but on this one we went a step further to iron out any sort of melody and double down on the density,” Foley says.

“Bands will always say that their new album is going to blow everything away, and then it’s so weak compared to the early shit. But I feel like I have some evidence to present to the court of heavy music about why this is a more severe record than anything that we’ve done.”

It wouldn’t be hard to convince a jury. From the sonic presence of the instruments to the structures of songs, the band’s assault sounds like the inside of a giant machine on the verge of shaking itself apart. And Foley’s vocal approach only gets stronger, a combination of Times Square street preacher and the neighbor who was so quiet until his standoff with the SWAT team.

But this won’t change anything. No matter the success of Bible Songs 2, the Austerity Program are still content being what they’ve always been.

“We have not decided to break up and the world has not forced us to, but I don’t know what the plan for the future is,” Foley says. “I just know that what we do has gotten us this far.”

—SHANE MEHLING

PHOTO BY THE AUSTERITY PROGRAM

THE AUSTERITY PROGRAM

PYRAMIDS

PYRAMIDS

Post-everything genre-benders return with first release in a decade

T

rying to guess what Pyramids might do next has always been an impossible task. From their noisier output (like their 2008 self-titled debut) to their collaborations with Nadja and Wraiths, to the desolate almost-blackened shoegaze of A Northern Meadow in 2015, every release has been an adventure. And now one decade after the latter, Pyramids are back to marry blast beats and reggaeton on a new record called Pythagoras. It’s not as insane as you might think. ¶ “Since the first album, our overarching sonic palette has been that push and pull that comes from washes of guitar over the steady pounding of the blast beat and its adjacent rhythms,” says Pyramids founder Rich Loren Balling. “With Pythagoras, the guitar style remains largely intact, as do the sections of blast beats juxtaposed with those guitars; and the melodic vocal lines alongside the buried percussive vocals also remain intact.

16 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

What was added here was the signature reggaeton beat under most verses, and the addition of Spanish female vocals moving in and out.”

Pythagoras falls somewhere between urging the listener to ball up and cry, or dance around the house. It’s a unique take on what the phrase “extreme music” means in 2025, and one that shamelessly pushes the boundaries. Or as Balling himself puts it, “It occurred to me that the signature foundation of reggaeton could be naturally subdivided by the blast beat, and I wanted to explore the possibilities.

People can be critical and say this isn’t a very metal move to make.

But I see this as the opposite— this could be the most extreme form of the genre yet.”

But why reggaeton? Why not lean into a more “metal-friendly” genre, or simply expand on a route

already trodden (to some extent) by the artists who have come before? To put it simply, because people crave a challenge in a music landscape dominated by feeding listeners more of the same.

“Despite the global presence of reggaeton, it is scarcely present in metal,” Balling notes. “I think people have become much more open to listening that makes them uncomfortable, because the algorithm continues to feed us more of the same, and different is refreshing. So, I think people are ready for it. Without sounding too selfimportant, I posit that Pythagoras not only works, but works well. It is a balanced representation of at least three genres without feeling forced, and if it is rejected, I can be comfortable knowing that it is precisely the vision we set out to realize.” —GREG KENNELTY

DECREPISY

DECREPISY

Through mortal suffering, an artistic seed takes root to grim bloom

S

uffering from inflammation of the nervous system and dysautonomia as a result of “vaccine damage,” Decrepisy songwriter Kyle House (Acephalix, Negative Prayer, ex-Vastum) was left unsure if he would ever be able to play music again. During the depths of health-related torment, House brought in longtime friend and bandmate Daniel Butler (Acephalix, Vastum) to handle Decrepisy’s deathbellows and high-concept lyricism. The end result is second LP Deific Mourning, a powerful display of doom-arched death metal replete with gothic/industrial overtones. ¶ “This album is much darker and bleaker than [2021 debut] Emetic Communion,” House confirms. “It was written during the hardest time of my life. It is a meditation on death; not in a romantic or removed way, but written in sickness and terror. A lived experience of a literal hell. ¶ “I wrote the songs as I recorded them,” he continues, “building with each [instrumental] layer, each riff inspiring the next. I channeled the immense sorrow, anguish and anxiety I was experiencing into the riffs. I truly didn’t know if 18 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

I would live to finish the album—I was so sick. I titled each song with a general theme of stages of grief and dying. The album was recorded remotely; we were never in the same room or city together. It was all demoed on GarageBand. It was a grueling process for me; the fatigue, brain fog and anxiety were so bad [that] I could hardly play a guitar or sit in front of a computer.”

By all accounts, the fact that this record was finished was a result of pure dogged determination in the face of physical collapse and mental torture. You can feel the suffering in the Incantation-esque riffs and the choking atmosphere they send forth, but also through the solos and queasy leads of Jonathan Quintana; along with Butler’s stentorian growls, they were captured in a resounding mix/master by Greg Wilkinson at Earhammer Studios.

Butler states that the lyrics “meditate on physical, spiritual and

psychological death, but they also draw on mystical, psychosexual and theological ideas … Deific Mourning is about God mourning his own death, which is something we all try to do before we’re actually dead—we mourn time passed before our time is up. But mostly, this album is about getting sick, facing physical death and confronting how psychologically dead we sometimes feel as a prelude to physically dying.”

Such thematic viewpoints mirror the wretched lived reality of House over the past couple of years, which adds extra gravitas to the emotionally dense extreme metal on display. According to Butler, however, there’s a certain positivity to be gleaned from conceptual/musical morbidity: “Dark, mystical, gut-wrenching music reminds us to contemplate, to meditate… even on our own death, which can change the world for the better.” —DEAN BROWN

WITHERER

WITHERER

Endless darkness begets endless darkness for Canadian black/doomers

W

ith the pax americana officially over after 80 years— and the world order completely upended in a matter of weeks—the harrowing, desolate funeral doom/black metal of Witherer’s stunning debut Shadow Without a Horizon feels like an apropos soundtrack to such a devastating societal shift. After all, nothing fuels the darkest extreme metal like trauma, be it collective or personal. ¶ “The initial compositions for this album were created shortly after a near-death experience I suffered way back in 2017 when I was struck head-on by a drunk driver,” explains guitarist/vocalist Tiamoath. “It suddenly made all of the old sayings—memento mori, hodie mihi cras tibi [“flee you may, escape you may not”]—very real. So, the initial riffs and compositions were put together in a very real state of crisis and despair. But I wasn’t sure what to do with some of those compositions for years, as they didn’t really suit the band I was in at that point, or Witherer as it was then conceived. ¶ “As that trauma was expunged—or at least subsumed in a healthier frame of mind, so that focus could again predominate— 20 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

the question became how to put together an album that could express this vision of an album which essentially functioned as a memento mori. The goal ended up being to craft compositions that capture both the immediate, tense panic and fear that usually precedes the moment of dying, but which also evokes the slow, dragging, prolonged feeling of decay.”

Shadow Without a Horizon captures that transcendent despair to visceral, relatable effect, masterfully balancing towering doom passages with ambient atmospherics, creating an immersive experience that’s somehow both a tortured yawp and a thoughtful meditation. Not bad at all for a first album. “‘Devourer of All Graveyards’ really encapsulates the songwriting approach of the band,” Tiamoath explains. “Vicious, punishing black/ death sections bookend the song,

while ritualistic, pensive funeral doom carves out its compositional heart. What we hope to create for the listener is a certain anxiety: By the time you’ve sunk into the atmospheric, meditative weight of the slower sections, the song spirals into violent intensity once more.

“Thematically, as well, the lyrics of this song are something of a summation of Shadow Without a Horizon as a whole. The caverns below one’s feet are, in a very real sense, the cathedral halls of specters and ghosts: The process of death and decay inevitably takes all bodies downwards into the earth, the devourer of all graveyards. The shadows aeons-long that stretch throughout the earth’s veins contain the same pitch-black as the cosmos—the heart of the earth, the heart of the heavens, the cloak of Mother Death. It is all endless shadow, shadow without a horizon.” —ADRIEN BEGRAND

In a softening world, existential provocateur NE RGAL continues to sharpen BE HE MOTH ’s blades story by T I M M U DD

IN 2025,

| photo by SY LWIA MAKRIS & CHRISTIAN MARTIN WEISS

with over three decades of desecration behind them,

Behemoth return not with subtlety, but with a hammer to the temple. Their latest album, The Shit Ov God, doesn’t ask for attention—it seizes it. The title alone, crude and theologically blasphemous, is a masterstroke of provocation. But for frontman Adam “Nergal” Darski, the goal was never mere shock. It was, as ever, to peel back the veil and dare you to look. ¶ “I was done with titles people can’t remember,” Nergal tells Decibel. “The Satanist was easy. I Loved You at Your Darkest? People still call it ‘that love one.’ This time, I wanted something no one could forget. Even if they forget the band, they’ll remember this title.”

22 : JUNE 2025 4 : DECIBEL

But The Shit Ov God isn’t just unforgettable because of its vulgarity. The inverted Latin cross hidden within the acronym IHS (a symbol for Christ in Catholic iconography) gave Nergal an epiphany: Turn it upside down, and you get “shit.” From that moment, the conceptual arc of the album was sealed—a piece that would combine spiritual mockery, existential dread and personal catharsis into eight explosive tracks.

Nergal’s use of inversion isn’t just aesthetic rebellion—it’s a personal exorcism. “I started inverting the cross 35 years ago,” he says. “It’s

been my strongest weapon.” By flipping one of Catholicism’s holiest sigils into blasphemy, he doesn’t just offend—he reveals. The Shit Ov God confronts the idea that even sanctity has a waste product. “If your faith is that weak, maybe it needs to be offended.

“It suggests that even the divine produces waste,” he explains. “Call it cosmic excrement.

That’s where we are. That’s what we are.”

Existentialist fire runs through Nergal’s veins these days. While Behemoth have always walked the razored line between the sacred and the profane, this record feels more intimate, more automatic. He describes the writing process as a kind of trance. Songs aren’t constructed with thematic precision, but rather exhaled, with meaning emerging years later like blood in water.

Take “To Drown the Svn in Wine,” one of the album’s most poetic moments. What began as a riff on a Walt Whitman line became, unconsciously, a farewell to Nergal’s father. “It just came out. And only later did I realize, this is about death. It’s about him. That’s how it works.”

Sonically, the album is as merciless as its message. Longtime producer Jens Bogren returned to helm the mix, pushing the band’s ferocity without sanding down its raw edges. Nergal calls the songs “vomited out,” but what lands

is anything but careless—every riff sounds scorched into the earth. It’s less about structure than spirit. “When I write, it’s trance,” he says.

“The unconscious takes over.” There’s no formula. Just invocation.

If that automatic process sounds mystical, it’s also fraught. The world Nergal finds himself in is one where provocation has become a liability.

He rails against what he calls the “palliative society,” one in which offense is currency and censorship masquerades as virtue.

“Even Nick Cave censors himself now,” he says, exasperated. “That terrifies me. That’s death for an artist. And we’ve all become victims of it.”

He tells a story about a proposed album cover based on a 1920s Nietzsche book: a swastika formed from crucifixes. The image, intended as a condemnation of two oppressive regimes, was rejected by Behemoth’s team out of fear that streaming platforms would blacklist the album.

Nergal still calls it an act of castration. “I didn’t invent it. I stole it. But it was brilliant. And they backed down. That cover should exist.”

So what does “extreme” mean to Nergal in 2025? Not blast beats. Not corpsepaint. Not orthodoxy. It’s honesty. It’s saying the thing you’re not supposed to say and refusing to apologize for the fallout. The Shit Ov God is extreme

not just because it sounds like a battlefield, but because it dares to matter.

“Look around. Music today? Oversaturated.

Forgettable. How many albums do you actually go back to? I go back to Slayer, to Morbid Angel, to Mayhem. The rest? Gone. There’s too much of everything. And none of it lasts.”

In an era of streamlined content and algorithmic art, Behemoth remain gloriously out of step.

They’re not part of a scene—they’re the shadow it tries to ignore. For Nergal, that friction is a feature, not a flaw. “I get called cringe. Boomer.

Dangerous. Good. That means I’m still doing something right.”

If the album is an act of war against complacency, its creator has found peace in a surprising place: family. At 48, Nergal describes his personal life as a kind of sanctuary. “It’s love,” he says, without flinching. “It’s where I recharge.

It’s my stronghold.”

This, too, is part of the Behemoth mythos now—not a contradiction, but a deepening. The Shit Ov God is both the exorcism and the aftermath. It’s the guttural scream and the silence that follows. It’s Nergal, still offending, still evolving, still being himself.

“I’m the best in the world at being me,” he laughs. “And I won’t change. Not now.

Not ever.”

DECIBEL : JUNE 2025 4 : 23

agnus Pelander—mastermind/frontman

MAGNUS PELANDER RELISHES

Witchcraft’s

RETURN TO HEAVIER SOUNDS

by J O H N H I L L

24 : JUNE 2025 4 : DECIBEL

of Swedish doom metal veterans Witchcraft and overall intimidating heavy metal presence—can’t stop laughing at my cat. ¶ “What is this cat, man? Are you a prankster? Am I being pranked?” Having not been logged into WhatsApp in a long time, I quickly threw a photo of my cat Dale as a profile pic before calling, not knowing it would be visible the entire call. “I can’t get the cat off my screen,” Pelander continues. “If you want me to take this conversation seriously, you’re going to have to get rid of the cat.” ¶ Request granted, I hung up and switched the cat out. I’m thankful in some small way to break the ice with Dale. In the past, Pelander has told interviewers, “No personal questions, nothing that isn’t about the band.” I ask why he’s been resistant, why he avoids diving in, and he thinks for a moment: “It’s always been the work I appreciate the most. I think most of my music is very easy, but very complicated. [Laughs] Some of these songs or ideas go back 30 years. It’s a true-life story that I’m sharing. It’s a weird thing to do, but somebody’s got to do it.”

Since forming in 2000, Witchcraft have been ahead of the curve in how they recontextualize heavy metal’s past. As they’ve continued, their sound has evolved in significant ways, moving them out of the Pentagram worship box into something truly them, best exemplified on 2012’s Legend. The biggest reason Witchcraft stay ahead of the competition is simply how goddamn good of a singer Pelander is. His inspiration doesn’t begin and end with Sabbath; his voice embodies his influences’ influences, as he’s able to croon with impressive confidence and a range that gives enough space for quieter and center-stage moments alike.

Witchcraft’s latest record, Idag, is their first since 2020’s all-acoustic curveball Black Metal, and first full metal album since 2016’s Nucleus. The title translates from Swedish into “Today,” and since the record is being released during the band’s 25th year, there’s a profound kind of longing, a look into the past that feels at the forefront. I tell Pelander that, in some ways, Idag almost seems like it could be the “final” Witchcraft record; that’s how complete it felt.

“That’s interesting,” he says. “Maybe it’s the end of an era and a beginning of a new one. If it were a movie, it would definitely be an ending with an open interpretation, like most of my records, and nobody knows the sequel. There’s no grand plan. I just move from what comes inside, and just go wherever that unconscious flow takes

me. But I do feel like this is the second coming of Witchcraft. I have that feeling.”

Whatever it is, an ending or a beginning, it does feel like a massive shift. The eponymous album opener is sprawling and patient.

Pelander’s riffs just hang, feeling as though you’re witness to that unconscious flow state as it materializes. For the first time ever, he sings in Swedish, as his voice takes on a serious urgency. When I ask why, he shrugs, “I’m as puzzled as anyone else is.”

“But it’s a constant practice. There’s so much shit constantly bombarding us with attention, but I think it’s necessary to actually sit with yourself.”

That inner awareness comes through, allowing the English half of the LP to unfold in unexpected ways. There are numerous times where, on songs like “Irreligious Flamboyant Flame,” a lesser band might be content to just rip through a simple verse/chorus; but you really feel like Pelander’s just letting the riff take over, not overthinking, just letting everything out. I tell him that I got the feeling he’s at a point where, while he still likes metal, the genre has become a framework to try and express everything he’s gone through over the last several decades. Riffs never stay contained to just being “evil” or “heavy”; rather, there’s a sense of trying to capture lived experience and beauty. There’s only today.

“Well, listening to you explaining it, it seems like I have done a great job,” he laughs. “The whole doing-interviews thing, I am flattered, and it’s amazing that people want to call me from across the ocean. But the music is just a catalyst, and maybe this is complicated for people to follow: I don’t quite know what people want to read about in a metal magazine. But the most important thing is that I have done the job, which is to record my thoughts and emotions so they fit the particular moment. [Then] the listener gets the moment of, ‘Hey, now it’s my turn.’ But man, you don’t need me. That’s the whole point.”

THERE’S NO GRAND PLAN. I JUST MOVE FROM WHAT COMES INSIDE, AND JUST GO WHEREVER THAT UNCONSCIOUS FLOW TAKES ME.

But I do feel like this is the second coming of Witchcraft.

I have that feeling.

M AGN US PE L A N DE R

However Pelander’s inner self manifests on the record, meditation has become a core part of his life. “I practice a lot of meditation and tai chi to stay in shape, to get my music connected with myself. I want the listener to really feel it, like, yeah, I’m there for you.”

It’s a process that started 15 years ago. “At a young age, I knew later on in life there’s going to be stuff I want, and that I would need to feel more present and connected with myself,” he explains.

PHOTO: ANZV

Sumerian Death/Black Metal

Death Metal Warfare Noise

DECIBEL : JUNE 2025 4 : 25

interview by

QA j. bennett

WIT H

KYLESA’s co-vocalist/guitarist on the band’s revival, her solo project the Discussion and punk band Cig Corpse

26 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

BY

now you’ve heard the news: Kylesa are back. Guitarists/

vocalists Laura Pleasants and Phillip Cope have teamed up with Nausea’s rhythm section—Roy Mayorga (drums) and John John Jesse (bass)—to revive the psych-sludge behemoth they put on ice back in 2016. By the time you get your greasy paws on this magazine, they’ll have already played Holland’s Roadburn Festival and Norway’s Inferno Festival. They’ll make their first North American appearance in nearly a decade at Toronto’s Prepare the Ground this summer. Then they’ll hit U.S. soil to play NYC and Savannah in December. ¶ “For me, enough time had passed that I was interested in playing these songs again and playing with Phillip again,” Pleasants explains. “It’s similar to the hiatus in that way. When we did that, it felt like time. And now it feels like time to revive the band.” ¶ Meanwhile, Pleasants will unveil the first full-length from her solo project, the Discussion. Steeped in goth atmosphere and Pleasants’ ghostly singing voice, All the Pretty Flowers is the post-punk yin to Kylesa’s gnarly yang. Which is exactly the point. “When Kylesa took a break, one of the first things I did was change my guitars to standard tuning,” Pleasants says. “I was like, ‘I’m done with this down-tuning shit for now.’ It’s great for certain kinds of music, but it has harmonic limitations. If you’re playing post-punk, it’s not the best.” ¶ As if that weren’t enough, she’s also playing in an (almost) all-female punk band called Cig Corpse. We spoke with her at length about all of her musical endeavors.

What sparked the conversation to revive Kylesa?

Phillip and I started talking about it around three years ago. I think what sparked that conversation is that we had put out this deluxe reissue of the first record. It was meant to be for the 20-year anniversary, but it ended up taking a little longer, so it was like 21 years after the first record came out, but it got a lot of excitement online. And then I just started thinking, and I called Phillip and said, “Hey man, if we ever want to do this again, now is roughly the time we should start thinking about it.” Phillip totally agreed.

Did you have anything specific in mind at that point?

I hadn’t really thought about it that hard. I was in a relationship. I had just purchased a house. I was just kind of wanting to step away from being on the road all the time, and I was also interested in playing different kinds of music. Even though Kylesa was always a band that could implement different styles and still be Kylesa, there’s only so much you can do before it becomes a different band.

What were the factors that led to Kylesa’s hiatus?

Once you and Phillip agreed to bring back Kylesa, did you already know you wanted new people involved rather than anyone who’d been in the band previously?

It was just old-fashioned burnout. We had been a band for just shy of 15 years, and I think a lot of it was just that—and wanting to do different things. I can only speak for myself, but I wanted to explore different aspects of the creative process of art and music. I’d been doing this with Kylesa for so long, and I just felt like it was time to pause and maybe look at other opportunities. There was no huge event. There was nothing that happened where we said, “Fuck this. It’s over.” I was getting burned out from touring and burned out on the scene. I was ready to look at different avenues.

We didn’t even think about that, exactly.

Kylesa has always been me and Phillip. We are the only original members. When he asked me to join, it was basically him and the ex-members of Damad, but after the first record, he and I were the only ones left. So, it’s been us and various members over the years, and some stayed longer than others.

We did hit up Carl [McGinley], who was the drummer for over 10 years. But he basically said, “Thanks for asking, but no.” He’s got other things in his life now, and we totally get it.

 PHOTO BY HOUSE OF VIVIAN

How did Roy and John John come into the picture?

It was serendipity. We hadn’t decided on a lineup yet, but we had already started booking a few things, and I think we had made one show announcement. John John DM-ed me on Instagram and said something like, “Reporting for duty if you need a bass player.” It was pretty cute. At first, I couldn’t believe it because I’m a huge Nausea fan. I wrote him back kind of half-joking and said, “Just get Roy on board and we’re off to the races.” The next day, he tells me Roy’s on board and he’s gonna call me.

I remember calling Phillip like, “Okay, dude.

Don’t get your hopes up, but guess what?” We’ve both been huge Nausea fans from a young age, so it was pretty incredible. We had met those guys before, so we knew them, but we never expected this.

How did the first practice go?

We did it in L.A. the first week of January, which was right when the city caught on fire.

I was like, “Welcome to L.A., Phillip!” But rehearsal was incredible. There were so many things at play. You have me and Phillip, who I’ve known since I was 17. I looked up to him and then we became good friends and started a band together. I hadn’t seen him in years, and we hadn’t played together since the last Kylesa show in Memphis in 2015. It was really lovely to just catch up with him as a friend and then play with him again.

And then you have Roy and John John, who have also been friends since they were teenagers.

They hadn’t played together in 30 years, so they had a rad friend reunion and a jam reunion as well. Witnessing that was really special. I thought, “I’m so lucky to be in this room with these guys right now.” And then, because I think the four of us are all cut from the same punk rock cloth, we just started playing and the chemistry was incredible. Everyone had done their homework, and it sounded heavy as shit.

Not a whole lot had to be said. We were all on the same page about everything. It was awesome. I really think this is meant to be.

Can we expect new Kylesa material?

I don’t want to say yes because I don’t want to promise anything that I can’t necessarily deliver, but it’s a never-say-never situation. I think it’s certainly possible, but right now we’re focusing on the shows, and we’ll go from there.

You moved to L.A. a few years ago. Was that related to starting the Discussion?

There are many reasons why I moved here, DECIBEL : JUNE 2025 : 27

 Cutting the static tension Pleasants (center l) and the revived Kylesa clearly understand time’s worth

Everyone had done their homework, and it sounded heavy as shit.

Not a whole lot had to be said. We were all on the same page about everything. It was awesome. I really think this is meant to be. but I needed a life change. Whether it was Savannah or L.A. or wherever, I did decide that I wanted to focus more on the Discussion. It was a little bedroom project for a few years, but I made the decision to take it to the next level. I had to make a conscious decision to really focus on music again in a serious way and not just as a hobby. And I wanted to do it with the Discussion since I had already made headway in terms of having a vision and what kind of music I wanted to do and so forth.

The Discussion is very different from Kylesa— more post-punk, more goth. Is that the kind of stuff you listened to before you got into heavy music?

I grew up listening to all sorts of music. I have a pretty wide, diverse palette. The grunge stuff hit me really young, so Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Melvins—all of those bands. But I was also super into Pantera and Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. Of course, Metallica was huge and Fugazi was really big then. Then I discovered punk and more underground metal stuff and went from there.

I remember having a tape with Led Zeppelin II on one side and Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking on the other. They were probably the first alternative band I ever heard, and I was a huge fan. After that, I went through a serious punk phase, and then crust punk, and then a deep psych-rock phase. But when I was getting into punk, I was also very much into the post-punk/goth stuff that was all kind of lumped together.

28 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

What can folks expect from the Discussion’s debut album, All the Pretty Flowers? How is it different from the EP and singles you’ve already put out?

I think there’s a masculine side to me and a feminine side to me. I definitely have traits of both sexes, and the Discussion is more of my feminine side. I really wanted to lean into that.

It’s something I’ve never been able to do fully with Kylesa because that band is more masculine and fucking tough and heavy and all these things that I love. But I really wanted to lean into this different side of me, which is what I’ve been doing with the Discussion.

On the album, I think my songwriting has improved immensely. The production quality is leaps and bounds better than anything the Discussion has recorded in the past. Not all the songs sound the same, but it’s definitely goth/ post-punk vibes. I worked with Jason Corbett up in Vancouver, and working with a producer really helped me hone my ideas. I stripped them down a bit to be a little more to the point and less meandering. But I think the real challenging part for me was becoming a better vocalist.

That’s one of the reasons I wanted to work with Jason. That was like nothing I’ve done in the past, and I really wanted to explore that.

Does the album have a lyrical theme?

The songs all deal with personal life experiences.

I generally write about real things and not necessarily fantasy or third-person stuff.

It’s all coming from the heart and from real experiences. Over the past several years, I’ve had

some tragedies, and I needed to sing about them.

A lot of the songs are about that. But some of the songs are about super current feelings and vibes.

I didn’t have a concept or a theme necessarily, but I did want to lean into this goth genre that I loved listening to growing up. With that kind of music—and metal as well—you can lean into the darker side of life and it really works. It fits the music, I think, and vice versa.

Last but not least: Tell me about your punk band, Cig Corpse.

It’s super fun. I’ve got to say that playing a Les Paul through a vintage Marshall is the best feeling. No pedal board, no bullshit. Just straight in. You get immediate AC/DC tones, and I love that. The band started a couple years ago with [guitarist] Magda [Wosinska], a girlfriend of mine. We were hanging out, and it had been 10 years since she’d played in a band. She was saying how she missed it and she’d love to play music again. She was about to turn 40, so I said, “Why don’t we start a punk band and play your 40th birthday party?”

Then I told her I would love to play with all women. I’ve only done that once—I had a punk band in college with a bunch of girls.

Then we found [bassist] Mikayla [Mayhew] from Blackwater Holylight. The three of us got together with [drummer] Nick [Townsend] and the songs came together really quickly.

And it’s not just punk—it’s hardcore punk. It’s screaming, simple power chords, angry and fast, and it’s super cathartic. I don’t think about it too much. I just play it.

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

by

josé carlos santos

The Lost Breed the making of the Gorement’s The Ending Quest

T

hese are other kids. This is just

that went on to other, more famous an accident—just a couple of wild bands. Nothing. Zilch. punks out raising hell.”

And yet, visit any Reddit thread or So goes the line from The Texas read any retrospective review of The Chainsaw Massacre 2 that opens Ending Quest and everyone is almost Supershitty to the Max!, the debut unanimous regarding its revered status. from Sweden’s famous rock sons the Gorement were distant from the two epiHellacopters, founded in 1994 by Nicke centers of the Swedish scene; generally Andersson alongside a couple of his exuninterested in and/or unable to follow roadies in Entombed. That same year, the Skogsberg-produced HM-2 crunch some other kids who had—almost by accithat revolutionized extreme metal; and dent—started as a bunch of wild punks boasted a set of influences that included raising hell after school, were finally early Paradise Lost/At the Gates, German releasing their debut album, The Ending thrash and likeminded anomalies Crypt DBHOF246 Quest, after having recorded it over a of Kerberos. Throw in a record label year before. that didn’t really know what to do with Unlike the relative stardom achieved them and a weird recording session in by their Stockholm and Gothenburg counGermany with an uninterested “dictator,” The Ending Quest trymen, these kids from Nyköping with and for better or worse, Gorement and a rather weird band name never really this album were molded into something CR YPTA achieved any kind of renown during truly unique.

M AY 1 5, 1 9 9 4 their trajectory as a band, which unforIt’s not the fastest or the most brutal.

Never let ’em see you sweat tunately ended shortly after this widely It’s also not the slowest or the gnarliest. ignored (at the time) LP was released on But just like its atypical artwork (which the soon-to-be-bankrupt Crypta Records. has a whole story of its own), The Ending However, what could be lost to the Quest still stands in a league all its own ever-shifting sands of time/lesser-visited to this day. We reunited guitarist and Encyclopaedia Metallum pages became what can truly be called a “cult clasbandleader Patrik Fernlund, guitarist Daniel Eriksson, vocalist Jimmy sic” as the years went by. It’s generally a stupid term, sure, but this is the Karlsson, bassist Nicklas Lilja and drummer Mattias Berglund to reminisce kind of album that it was created for: something released with zero fanabout days long past. But hey, if it’s up to them, those days might not be fare, promotion, reviews, feedback, live shows to back it up or members entirely over. Promoters, take note.

GOREMENT

DECIBEL : 31 : JUNE 2025

DBHOF246

GOREMENT the ending quest

Where did Gorement come from? How did you guys get together in the first place?

PATRIK FERNLUND: We were just five friends from school. We went to the same class.

The band at the time of its beginning was me, Daniel and Niklas, with two other schoolmates, Tobias and Jeppe, who was actually Jesper Lerje Ruud; he would later be the singer in Disfear. And we started to play, simply. Just having fun. We weren’t specifically good, but we had a lot of fun. We learned how to play. We learned how to put together songs, and we did a lot of covers back then, too. It was just that: five 14-year-old friends who had fun. We smoked cigarettes, we took some Swedish snuff. But eventually the band became a little more serious.

NICKLAS LILJA: Yeah, when we started playing together, we were very young, Patrik had only started playing guitar. I don’t really remember much from those days, but I do remember we decided what instrument each of us would play, and it was set that I could play bass. We then started to rent or buy cheap equipment, and we borrowed a space in a small community house near where we lived. We took our instruments there in baby trolleys at first! We all went to that little house and played on the weekends. It was almost just bad punk and very, very easy songs to play.

DANIEL ERIKSSON: We were from the same neighborhood. We were basically a normal group of friends, but with a big interest in music. Some of us wanted to be rock stars. I wanted to be Ace Frehley! He was my all-time hero. It’s quite a big ambition and I never really got there. But we were all able to learn how to play instruments. I still remember that awful punk stuff we used to play. The lyrics were grotesque, what you would expect from a bunch of 15-year-olds.

JIMMY KARLSSON: I joined a little later—I was in another group, and when their original singer left, they asked me if I could come on and do some tests with them, and that was it! I was in.

They weren’t that known still, even in the local scene, but I was very much into metal. I’ve been into it since the very beginning, and I really liked how they sounded.

What were you listening to during this formative period?

LILJA: Mostly metal and, you know, old KISS and W.A.S.P. and Mötley Crüe and stuff like that. Further on, I think Patrik introduced us to some more extreme metal, like Napalm Death and Carcass and Celtic Frost. And of course, we all liked Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and all those classics.

ERIKSSON: I think the thrash scene was very important for us. First it was Metallica, then

“I came up with a mix of Gore and Torment, putting them together: Gorement! I don’t exactly know what it means. But that’s another story. That’s part of the magic, perhaps, right? Not knowing.”

MAT T IAS B E RG LUND Slayer, and then the Germans—Kreator and Destruction and Sodom; that’s when it started getting really interesting. We started to play covers of these bands, and we did that for a while until we got bored of dragging our stuff to that place just to play on our own for two hours and then bringing them back home again. That’s how we started looking around the local musician scene to find a proper place to rehearse.

FERNLUND: Yeah, we really enjoyed the thrash scene back then. Lots of Sodom, Kreator, Celtic Frost and all that stuff for me, too. We just played around for a year like they said, and then it started to get a little bit serious. We eventually did get a proper rehearsal place, and we finally started to rehearse regularly, not just fooling around. Around that time, both Jesper and Tobias got tired of it all. There were some arguments, just things that happen when you’re 15 years old. We also started to discover some other music and broaden our horizons. In our case, it was the sort of death metal that was around at that time; it was basically the birth of the genre, so it was a good time to be into it! Jesper got the Grindcrusher compilation from Earache at the end of ’89. From then on, we were sold. We started to discover more; we were going up to Stockholm sometimes, going to the House of Kicks [record] store there, in the old town.

KARLSSON: Yeah, that compilation was really important. We all got to know so many favorite JUNE 2025 : 3 2 : DECIBEL

bands from there. As for influences on my vocals, I always liked Ola Lindgren’s vocals, and also Karl Willetts. I listened to early Grave and Bolt Thrower all the time; they were my favorite bands.

ERIKSSON: We’d go to Nörrkoping, too, which is like half an hour from where we’re from. They used to have these events called Thrash Bash; when we were getting into the death metal scene, we saw quite a few big names there. We always went for those shows and I remember seeing Therion on a 10-centimeter stage. I was standing right next to the guitarist and trying to see what he was playing and what pedals he used and stuff. I totally loved their second demo [Beyond the Darkest Veils of Inner Wickedness] that I got at one of those shows. It opened something in me—it was like, you can do it like this? Opeth were at those shows at one point, too, in their really early days. The biggest name for the time we saw there was Carcass, though.

It was quite a scene, and it was really close, and we didn’t have to go all the way to Stockholm to see these shows.

FERNLUND: We also discovered the whole demo scene around that time, which was very important. Sadly, that was also when we drifted a little bit apart from each other, especially Tobbe and Jeppe. So, they left the band, but we decided to continue. That’s when Mattias came around, and from there on, we said, “Okay, this is serious.”

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MATTIAS BERGLUND: I wasn’t even a real drummer

then, but I felt like I had to play in this band. I had to fucking do it. I bought the drums and I just tried to nail every part I had to do. I wanted in on this band badly. And I guess they respected that.

FERNLUND: Absolutely. Mattias actually started to play drums during the summer of 1990. We started to rehearse as Gorement during the winter of 1991. By April, we were already down to Gorysound Studios in Finspång to record our first demo with Dan Swanö. Mattias had played drums for just nine months before we recorded our first demo. I think that is very impressive.

BERGLUND: Those recordings with Dan Swanö were very cool, though. That helped. Dan was a very nice guy, very disciplined. I remember he did the intro for us for free on the first demo.

And he didn’t take the credits at all. He just wrote, “intro by Day DiSyraah.” I mean, who’s that?! He supported us 100 percent, so yeah, much credit to him for what he did in the early stages of the band.

What was the band name during these early pre-demo times? Were you Testicle Perspirant at this time?

FERNLUND: Yeah, Testicle Perspirant. We even had a song called that. I think we were called Testicle Perspirant first, then we were called Sanguinary—we actually did a few live shows with this name, and at one point we were called Decay. Executioner also; I almost forgot about that! I actually can’t remember in which order we had those names. We constantly changed, there was so much going on. We were finding out what the band was in every way. Should we play thrash? Should we play death/thrash? Or should we go totally Swedish death metal?

ERIKSSON: Some of the things we heard really struck us, like that Therion demo I mentioned.

It’s something that really plays a part in your musical evolution and development. Another revelation I had was with Paradise Lost’s Gothic.

I’ve always had a soft spot for melodies like that and I really wanted to go in a similar direction.

So, how did you get to the name Gorement?

BERGLUND: I actually came up with the idea and asked if we could change the name we had at the time. I came up with a mix of Gore and Torment, putting them together: Gorement! I don’t exactly know what it means. But that’s another story. That’s part of the magic, perhaps, right? Not knowing.

FERNLUND: I thought it sounded cool, though I wanted to have a name with two words at first.

But I got voted down and they said, “No, just Gorement.” And that sounds good to me now.

Keep it simple. I still argued that we couldn’t name it Gorement because then everyone would

think we had taken the name from Gorefest! We were told several times we had to be a Gorefest rip-off. But in the end, I think the name really stood the test of time. It’s a little bit timeless. So, yeah, I’m happy that we took the name Gorement.

Patrik is credited as the main songwriter, but was there much interplay between him and Daniel as the two guitar players? Did the rest of the band also participate in the process?

ERIKSSON: I must give all credit to Patrik; he was really the driving force. But I think I contributed a little bit more than the rest, perhaps just because I was loud in speaking my mind, and the rest were a bit more like, “yeah, whatever.”

Patrik wrote most of the stuff; he always came to rehearsal with a lot of ideas. Then we gave our opinion, maybe pointed out a few changes, more of an arrangement kind of thing, as a band. He and I could then sit; he had a melody and I’d put some chords to it and stuff like that. But the lead of the band was clearly Patrik, yeah.

When did a full-length album start to come into the picture?

FERNLUND: Well, we recorded the two demos in 1991. We were still kind of learning how to play and write songs by then, so I’m glad that we didn’t get any contract or any proposal back then, because we were not ready at all. It all came together much better between the second demo and the EP. Because, actually, the last track on the Obsequies... demo, “Obsequies of Mankind,” is the link from that demo to the EP that we released in 1992, Into Shadows. We kind of found our real style somewhere in between those releases. So, when we got an offer from the infamous Inline Records/Crypta Records, we were like, “Okay, we’re ready. This is it. Let’s do it.”

We got the contract proposal mailed to us in, I think, end of spring 1992. We got down to Germany to talk with Inline Music or Crypta Records. I don’t know which one we were talking to. But I think the letter was actually from Inline Music. But they were talking about this sublabel, Crypta Records, an offshoot kind of thing. When they offered us the deal and they showed us the studio that we were supposed to do the album in, Delta Studios, I mean, we were kind of blown away. We couldn’t believe it. We had recorded the two demos and the EP with Dan Swanö in a basement. It was an old house from the ’40s or ’50s with a dull and damp basement—that’s where the Gorysound Studios were located. So, when they suddenly showed us the Delta Studio, we were very impressed. We thought this was it, our big break.

But you still had some songs to write, even if you did “recycle” some of the demo and EP songs for the album, right?

FERNLUND: Yeah, from that moment on, we had to quickly come up with at least five or six more JUNE 2025 : 3 4 : DECIBEL

tracks to complete the album. We had already decided to have three demo tracks and the two from the EP included on the album, but we needed at least five or six more. It was a stressful time. We signed the contract with Inline/Crypta in October of ’92, and we were scheduled directly to go to the studio in February. Since I was the guy who wrote the riffs and put the tracks together and did most of the arrangements, I had a lot of pressure on me.

BERGLUND: It was a serious period, but everyone in the band felt like, fuck, this is really good music. It was really exciting for us to play the songs. We put our souls into it. Hell, we gave it everything we had: our hard work, our money, everything.

ERIKSSON: We were in full swing. I don’t remember us ever doing a song and then thinking, “It’s not good enough.” We just made the songs and then it was like, “Let’s record, it’s enough!”

KARLSSON: I always thought the band was really good. I wasn’t surprised at all when we got the deal, and I always trusted Patrik and the guys to come up with something awesome, and they did!

It’s unanimous to everyone that Gorement’s style is pretty unique, even when coming from a country that was developing its own very specific scene—or scenes—at the time. How do you feel that you reached this style?

FERNLUND: I think we were never into a specific scene ourselves. The Swedish death metal sound, in my opinion, in the ’90s, there was a lot of good stuff; but around that time, I wasn’t so much into that hardcore punk thing—the D-beat—like Disfear was, for instance. Today, I love the style. But back then, I didn’t really enjoy it, and most of the Swedish death metal bands were doing this punk thing. That was part of the base for a lot of those bands. I, on the other hand, was more into Bolt Thrower, and I loved melody. Around that time, doom bands were very rich in melody. I was listening to Paradise Lost a lot, both the first album and Gothic. Tiamat, too… I wanted us to sound much more like Tiamat actually, especially [The] Astral Sleep! But maybe it was for the best that we didn’t put in too many influences from them.

Also, talking about this decisive period between the demo and the EP, I listened to At the Gates a lot, particularly the first EP with all the harmonies and stuff. So, the main reason for us not sounding typically Swedish, I think that was because I had a lot of influences from doom bands, and especially the melodies. We also shouldn’t forget about Crypt of Kerberos and Eternal Darkness, from Eskilstuna. Especially Crypt of Kerberos. Great, great riffs. Maybe not so much an influence in terms of melodies, but those riffs! Really heavy stuff, memorable. That’s something that always has stuck with me: to write memorable riffs. That has been kind of my thing. And if it is not a riff, maybe a

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memorable melody. Though I also liked the really brutal stuff, you know, the heavy stuff. It’s still death metal. But to be honest, I have never considered us to be an original band.

LILJA: I think the underground scene in Sweden was quite fun because all those fanzines and magazines that covered it started to contact us.

They wrote something about us and people were sending our demo tapes to each other. I think we just wanted to sound like the most cruel metal as possible. In the beginning, I remember we had downtuned our instruments so much, and though we thought it sounded great, it was really hard to play because the strings were so loose they were fluttering about! But then we heard Napalm Death “Suffer the Children,” that song in particular. It was the first well-produced sort of death metal I heard. And of course, there was Nihilist and then Entombed in Sweden. They were great examples to us.

BERGLUND: I was listening to a lot of Carcass myself, so when we decided to tune down the guitars to D, that sounded very good to me. But yeah, we were outsiders in a way. We didn’t belong to any of the big scenes. We weren’t from Stockholm or Gothenburg; we were in the middle! Entombed and all those other bands who recorded with [Tomas] Skogsberg hung out in Stockholm all the time, and we were on our own.

But I think that was good for our music.

ERIKSSON: I do think we had a more Stockholmish sound when we were actually rehearsing, rather than on the album.

KARLSSON: I think we found our own style.

We weren’t the fastest, or the slowest, or the heaviest band around. We just mixed everything—and it worked.

old kids just trying to make some really cool death metal. I think it may sound a little bit pretentious, but I think I started to think a bit more about song structures and dynamics in the tracks as time went by, tempo changes and everything. Sometimes maybe I overdid something, you know, but I started to think about all that as I wrote. So, from the direct style of the demos, I think in comparison, the later stuff became almost a little bit progressive, maybe.

What was the recording like in general?

FERNLUND: We were supposed to be there for 14 days, but we got the job done really quickly. We had some problems on the trip there, but the actual recording went really well mostly. We set up the drum kit and all the settings for the drum sound in one day. Mattias had to play through all the tracks by himself before any of us did, and it was really impressive. He was amazing. A big shout-out to him because he was great. On the second day of us being there, he nailed the whole 10 tracks, just with me doing some guide guitar to help him out. Overall, even if we had a few silly accidents, mainly due to being very young and inexperienced, it went very well.

On the third day, for example, when I was supposed to record my rhythm guitars, the producer asked me about my guitar tuner. We looked at each other and just told him, well, we don’t have one. But, I mean, we were in a million-dollar studio, super modern, a 24-channel recording desk—surely he’d have one, right?

But no. So, on that day, instead of recording, we had to take our minivan and go to Hamburg to buy a goddamn guitar tuner. It was mostly stuff like that, and I have to say during the entire process we did have some strange vibes from the

So, getting back to the timeline. You had more songs to write. Do you find some difference between those songs and the ones that you had from the demos and EP? FERNLUND: Oh yeah, yeah. The demo tracks were much more direct. Typical of a bunch of 16-year-

“To be honest, I have never considered us to be an original band”

PAT R I K FE R N LU N D

JUNE 2025 : 36 : DECIBEL

producer and the whole situation. But overall, it was a smooth session.

LILJA: A lot of the problems we had were actually during the trips to and from the studio.

For example, I remember Jimmy didn’t want to drive in Germany to get us there. And when we forced him to drive, he started driving on the wrong side of the road and also almost crashed the car! Then when we were going home, as we drove through the border between Sweden and Denmark, we had a lot of booze and beers with us, so the rest of the band told me to drive because they thought I looked the most innocent. I had done my military service right at that time, so I had short hair. But the people at the border, they didn’t go for it and told us to “take the car to that garage over there, please.”

So, I had a bill for, what do you call it, you know, when you’re smuggling? A fine. That wasn’t fun.

KARLSSON: That was the first and last time I drove in Germany! Also, on the day I was supposed to record my vocal parts, I got sick with a stomach thing. I can actually tell which songs were recorded on that day, because I don’t have as much “oomph” as I usually do on them, and it’s because of the stomach bug I had. Especially on “Sea of Silence,” I remember. I had puked all night, and not because of the booze! But hey, it’s part of the game. Something always happens. In the end, I think everyone was a little surprised with my performance overall—since we had such shitty equipment in our rehearsal room, no one had ever really heard how I really sounded.

Even I was surprised when I heard the recordings; my voice sounded much darker than I or anyone else expected.

BERGLUND: When we got there, Thomas Schrum, the producer, immediately said, “Where’s the drummer?” Then he looked at me and went,

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“That’s you.” I was like, “How do you know?”

Then he told me straight away he wanted me to play all the songs without guitar, without anything. Just play the 10 songs, do my parts, on my own. He wanted to know if I was prepared. I guess he had some doubts about the drumming.

But as Patrik said, I fucking nailed it. Then I basically had some beers for the rest of the days!

We had a lot of fun. I think I even puked in the house where we were staying at one point.

ERIKSSON: Mattias was fucking amazing, and he had some tricky parts, too. I was nervous, though, I admit. With the exception of Mattias, none of us were really very good at playing, still. That was one of the first situations I had like that, of being like, come on, show us what you got! I was actually a little jealous that Patrik got to play with Mattias to help out with his recording, because he got to warm up! I was sitting in the studio for several days just waiting it out to do my piece. We were just young kids, and I was really anxious. I think it ended up okay, but I still have moments today where I listen to it and go like, “Ah, I wish I could do that bit again!”

What do you think gave you those weird vibes you mentioned?

FERNLUND: I was 18 and maybe a little bit too pretentious. I think that was mostly it. I had imagined someone playing a little cello and viola, maybe that we’d have a little chamber orchestra. But of course, there was nothing of the sort. We had to do all those bits with a synthesizer. The only thing that I am still a bit curious as to what it would have sounded like is the female singer we intended to have for this melody line in “Sea of Silence.” I think it’s Jimmy doing some whispering instead, but we had a melody line in the background that was supposed to have been a female singer, and I think that would have been great.

The relationship with the producer didn’t seem to have been all that warm, though, right?

FERNLUND: He didn’t listen to all our ideas, and I think he didn’t have a clear vision of what we were trying to achieve. But on the other hand, sound-wise, he was really close to what we wanted, according to some records we brought him for reference.

LILJA: But he had actually promised he’d have those things to fulfill our ideas: the cellos and stuff that Patrik mentioned. When we arrived, there was nothing. Just him.

ERIKSSON: I still have my Ibanez guitar that we recorded with. I remember him being so disappointed when we saw our instruments. He was like, “Oh, you got that.” He really looked down on us. I don’t think he liked us at all, and to be

honest, we didn’t like him much either. I had a bit of a rebellious feeling, like, we’re here now, so accept us being here! Work with us! He was quite a dictator. I don’t know if he had the idea to do something with the album that no one else was doing, if it was intentional or not. He wasn’t the kind to reason with us; he just told us to do stuff. I can still hear him shouting at Patrik, “Take it again, Patrik,” with his German accent.

And Patrik was so angry, he’d just say “That.

Was. Good.” [Laughs] The artwork is also weird, albeit in a strangely memorable way. What is it, really?

FERNLUND: Oh man, I have tried so hard to Google for it… The thing is, we found this picture of a statue—so yes, it’s a statue, not a person!—on a Swedish history book, and it was from a series of books. One was about the antiquity, another about ancient Greece, and this specific one was about statues. I think it was called Your History, but in Swedish, so Din Historia, and I believe it was Mattias’ parents who had this collection. He just brought the book and showed it to us and asked, “Wouldn’t this be a great album cover?” We didn’t really see it at first, but after some time we agreed, especially because it would be something different from the usual.

Sadly, we made a lot of mistakes. First of all, we couldn’t send the book down to Germany, to the guy who was going to put everything together, so we had to make a copy of it. Remember this was back in 1993, so to photocopy something in color... it was basically a disaster. It was a really bad copy—you can even see the lines from the copier, and the color became kind of dull, it just looked crap.

We should have stopped it then, but we didn’t have anything else, so we sent that picture to Germany. Furthermore, the wing on the statue wasn’t on the original. Neither was the nipple!

[Laughs] The original was just a strange picture of the statue on the right side, then you had the beautiful sky with the sun. What Crypta Records did was they added the dragon wing and the nipple, and probably brushed up the image a bit somehow, as much as possible with the technology back then. But I can’t remember where this statue is located, and I could never find it again.

I’ve tried to find the book. I’ve tried Googling for it, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything so far.

When the album was finally released, did you get any reactions to it?

FERNLUND: No, nothing. That was the most frustrating thing. We contacted the label, we kept asking them how things were going, we were constantly nagging them, but never got any information… Due to our contract, we had to pay the label promotion money, so we actually had invested quite a bit of money back JUNE 2025 : 38 : DECIBEL

then specifically for that matter, and absolutely nothing happened. The album came out in May 1994—so over a year after we recorded it, which was another terrible thing—and there were no magazines doing interviews or reviews, no feedback, nothing. That’s what we had paid money for, after all, and I never did one interview for that album. It was all dead silent.

LILJA: We had spent all that time imagining how it would be when we saw the album in every record shop, but in the end, we never did.

ERIKSSON: I was actually disappointed myself when I listened to the album. To be honest, I did want us to sound like the other big Swedish bands at the time. You know this one? [He digs out an HM-2 pedal and holds it up.] That’s what I wanted to sound like, I wanted a more gnarly sound. Today I’m super happy we didn’t go there. I’m happy we got more of our own sound.

But at the time, I was really sad. I wanted something bigger. I didn’t want to sound like we always did in the rehearsal room. In my mind, I thought it would just be a snap of the finger in the studio, and bam, we would sound all mighty and powerful.

Was that what precipitated the end of the band?

FERNLUND: More or less, yeah. With the huge wait until the album release and the total absence of feedback, we were left very frustrated and disillusioned. Mattias left the band during that period. Soon after the album came out, he decided that was enough, and that was pretty much the final blow. We had worked on some other tracks, but we decided to record only three of them, and they’re the ones on Promo ’95. Of those three, only “Profound Harmony” was recorded with Mattias still in the band, and it’s a hint as to what the continuation of The Ending Quest could have been. From then on, well, we kind of lost it. “Garden of Delight” is like ’70s doom/rock and “Soulless Sanity,” well, I like it, but… it’s not Gorement.

ERIKSSON: We felt like it had all been for nothing. We were bored, frustrated, losing money.

The only things coming through our mailbox were the bills for the production. We got a copy of the album on CD and that was it. Nothing else. We looked at it like, “So, this is what we’re paying for? Great.”

LILJA: Yeah, if the album had been out sooner, if it had been well-distributed and if more people had a chance to listen to it, maybe it would have been different. I mean, there are people playing our songs on YouTube and stuff today. That’s really fun, but also a bit frustrating.

KARLSSON: Being ripped off by the label, which then went bankrupt was very hard to take.

They still held onto the rights of the album for 10 years, which was also horrible. Just a lot of bad luck. We could have done a few more Gorement records with ease if things had gone a different way.

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Do you still think about that today? Is the whatmight-have-been of Gorement still on your mind?

FERNLUND: Of course, of course. There’s a track that we released with Piper’s Dawn, it’s the last one on the EP we did; it’s called “Seasons of Ending,” and that was actually a Gorement track. Jimmy has talked about re-recording it because we really loved it. It would be cool.

ERIKSSON: I think we would have stayed quite true to our own sound if the band had gone on.

Maybe we would have gotten more melodic, I might have opposed Patrik’s tendency to make some repetitive patterns, which I hated at the time. [Laughs] We have a few songs that we never released that are totally Gorement.

Listening to the album today, how does it feel?

Do you have any favorite songs?

LILJA: I have it on my phone, on Apple Music.

I’m very proud of it. It was mostly a lot of fun, that whole period, so I look back on it with great fondness. As for the songs, I think my favorite is still “Sea of Silence.”

BERGLUND: I think every song on the album is beautiful in some way. Every time I listen to it, I feel that I was part of something wonderful. And it was a real challenge as a drummer because the songs were so varied and had so many different parts. I remember already on the second demo, there was a part of a song that Dan Swanö said, “Fuck, this is faster than Morbid Angel!” That was a good compliment!

ERIKSSON: I don’t really listen to it. Almost never, honestly. Sometimes when we get together with my brother and my friends, there’s lot of metalheads and they like Gorement. In those moments, some conversation might come up and we put it on. But that’s more or less it. I do have a few favorites still, though. We eventually got really bored with the older songs, but I do like “My Ending Quest” and “Vale of Tears.” It’s a great opening of the album with those two. Parts of “Sea of Silence” are cool, too—I wrote the lyrics, so that one is special to me a little bit.

KARLSSON: I think “The Lost Breed” and “Into Shadows” are my favorites. It was so unusual to play this kind of music so slow like that. I listen to the album sometimes, about once a year. If I’m with friends who haven’t heard it, I always dig it out, too. I’m really proud of it. I mean, five teenagers go to Germany and record an album in the early ’90s, and this comes out? I wish we would have continued.

How do you deal with the importance the record has gained in the underground since then?

FERNLUND: It’s a really cool thing. I’m flattered.

It’s a big honor to have this album be called a “cult classic” and things like that. I still can’t believe it. A work colleague told me the other

“It’s so weird, isn’t it? Of course, it makes me happy and proud, but it’s also a bit frustrating.

Why the fuck didn’t we get this cred all those years ago?

It’s like the 27 Club: You have to be dead to be really famous.”

DA NIE L E RIKSSO N day something about the album, that he wished he had made something like this, that he could show his grandkids and be proud about it. That made me think of it in a really good light.

KARLSSON: As the internet came and I did some searches on Gorement, that’s really when it hit me. In my opinion, it’s a record that has gone through generations. Not many can claim to have done that on their own, without any kind of promotion or help from anyone, without live shows or the band being active... It’s a diamond in the rough, but I’m so proud of it.

BERGLUND: Everyone’s just madly in love with the album now. And to think we had Crypta Records have only a thousand copies printed.

Sold out directly, apparently, and they still got bankrupt. Now I see the album on Discogs sometimes going for hundreds of dollars!

ERIKSSON: It’s so weird, isn’t it? Of course, it makes me happy and proud, but it’s also a bit frustrating. Why the fuck didn’t we get this cred all those years ago? It’s like the 27 Club: You have to be dead to be really famous. If we had gotten only a fraction of the praise we’ve been given during this time, we would have lived on as a band.

Is the temptation to return still there?

FERNLUND: Oh, yeah. When we had the compilation album, we actually had the rehearsal place booked to try to get the band to play again with this very same lineup. It didn’t materialize after all; there were some problems, and we ended up missing that chance to do something cool, but it’s okay. Before the pandemic hit, me, Daniel and Mattias met in Mattias’ rehearsal place—I think it JUNE 2025 : 40 : DECIBEL

was in 2019. Jimmy also showed up and we played through a couple of songs and it was okay. It wasn’t good, but it was okay! It’s natural, not all of us have continued to play music after Gorement, not all have rehearsed with other people in a long time, and that shows. It’s a muscle that you need to exercise, so I’m sure with a few more rehearsals it would have gone up to the level we’d like.

It wasn’t the main goal anyway; it was supposed to be friends getting together, having a drink and a laugh. And after doing that, now we know that if we all feel like it, if we all feel like coming together and reforming the band one of these days, we can, it’s possible. I’d gladly do it.

KARLSSON: I think those days went very well. I’m sure up for it if it happens.

LILJA: I haven’t played in 20 years or so. So, I’d have to learn stuff again. We’d need some rehearsals at least. I wasn’t even very good then, let alone now! But I would say yes if there was an opportunity. I would be nervous as hell, it would be a stupid thing to say yes to, but I would do it.

BERGLUND: I can still play everything, the whole album. I have two drum kits at home and one in the studio, so I play a lot. I’m also in a new band called Bloodstained, so I practice all the time. If we have regular rehearsals with Gorement again, I see it happening.

ERIKSSON: I think that when we all sit together, we’ll have a few beers and we’ll absolutely decide that we should do something together. I don’t know if I can see myself onstage now. I have a bit of stage fright. I guess it could work as a oneoff. But at least some recordings—that I would totally love to do.

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• :J U NPE T2E0M2B 5 E•R D2E0C L ECIBEL 42 SE 2 3I B:ED

STORY BY DANIEL LAKE • PHOTOS BY SHIMON KARMEL

HOW PELICAN REKINDLED THEIR CREATIVE FLAME AND NOW BURN BRIGHTER THAN EVER

DECIBEL : SEPTEMBER 2023 : 43

D

ifferent notes seemed to collect at different locations in space— some “Mammoth”-like weight. “Early on, it was

sometimes such a node would be so tightly focused I could dip my head into and out of it just by nodding.” ¶ These words—penned

by Philip Montoro for the Chicago Reader in July 2003—were the only sales pitch needed to kick off my two-decade-long fascination with Pelican, who just then were beginning their rise toward heavy instrumental prominence with regional shows, a demo EP recently re-released by Hydra Head Records, and their soon-to-emerge grand debut statement, Australasia. Montoro wasn’t precisely writing about Pelican in the above description—he was illustrating a comparison between the Illinois foursome and the New York sound artist Phill Niblock, whose work Montoro had experienced a couple years earlier—but he tied it all back together by following up: “The biggest differences between a Pelican show and a Niblock installation are the drums and the secondhand smoke.”

“To us, the physical aspect of the sound was very important,” says guitarist Trevor de Brauw of those early shows, though he’s quick to counter that “there was maybe something that was getting lost in all of the volume at first, because we hadn’t learned how to focus in on clarity, at least in the live environment. Because we hadn’t learned how to harness the nuances that were in our music, and we were coming at it from this maximalist performance direction, many people might have misinterpreted some of the layers of composition that were going on in our work.”

Fellow guitarist-in-chief Laurent SchroederLebec—who stepped away from the band in phases about 15 years ago and then returned to the fold in 2022—has similar thoughts about what informed Pelican’s early performances, but couldn’t really survive contact with their broadening compositional approach, even in those days. “I was thinking about some of our contemporaries at the time, some easy call-out bands that we were all influenced by. You’d go see those early High on Fire shows—or I remember seeing Eyehategod at the Fireside [Bowl] with [drummer] Larry [Herweg] back in the day—and I remember thinking volume is so important.

• :J U NPE T2E0M2B 5 E•R D2E0C I B:E D L ECIBEL 44 SE 23

We just wanted to be loud. That was a way to feel it, and it was just immediately appealing. But a lot of stuff that goes on in bands that are hyperloud is repetition, and quickly we moved away from repetition being the only thing happening to wanting to have more nuance and dialogue between all the instruments.”

“If you think about the order that we wrote the songs on [Australasia],” de Brauw adds, “you can see the progression. ‘Drought’ is the first song we wrote on that album, which is very invested in repetition and there’s not a whole lot of dynamics. Then ‘Australasia’ and ‘Nightendday’ were maybe the last two songs we wrote, and those are obviously much more sophisticated compositions. When the album dropped, and Phillip was able to engage with the album versions of those songs, he was like, ‘I didn’t realize how much nuance and music there was to what you guys were doing.’”

Renowned metal guru Sanford Parker, who stands in the knob-twiddling shadows behind an absurd number of brilliant and important records of the past 20 years, has been on board with Pelican since the beginning, and his continuing relationship with the band through this year’s Flickering Resonance lends his perspective

all about crushing your skull with volume,” Parker recalls. “Now it’s more about crafting a journey, creating ebbs and flows, ups and downs.

They have grown as musicians and songwriters for sure, perfecting the art of dynamics.”

Pelican’s growth through the first quarter of the 21st century has ensured that none of their EPs or album-length volleys tread the same thematic ground, a fact that remains equally true for the charged riffs, triumphant melodies and origami harmonies of their seventh album, Flickering Resonance. These eight songs reveal an invigorated Pelican, writing again with the full lineup that fueled their Hydra Head breakthroughs.

“As soon as we got this lineup of the band back together, there was…” de Brauw starts, and then trails off thoughtfully. “You know how you never forget how to ride a bike? You just jump on and you still know how to do that.

There’s a resonance to the creative partnership of these four people that feels very specific and scratches a very specific itch in each of us.

Being able to rediscover that and reexamine it and delve into it has been incredibly rewarding. [And] we realize how fleeting these opportunities can be. That’s the ‘flickering’ aspect of the resonance: It could be extinguished at any time, so we’re trying to be really grateful and as expressive in this avenue as we can with the time that we have.

“I think the themes that are percolating all over this record without words are a gratitude practice. Also, [an intention] not to just make music, put it out, tour, rinse, repeat, but to be able to absorb the preciousness of it all.”

WANDERING MIND

Around 2010, after ascending to a scene peak

with The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, proving their versatility with the relatively concise City of Echoes, and bursting into the Southern Lord stables with What We All Come to Need, Schroeder-Lebec began stepping away from his life with Pelican. It was a gradual process,

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primarily avoiding touring at first, but by the middle of 2012, he decided a clean break was the best choice. His reasons were myriad, and in conversation, it sounds like he’s still in the process of unwinding and making sense of them; he credits his wife and her training as a therapist for giving him some of the tools to better understand his mindset and those decade-old decisions.

“I don’t have a direct causal reason for why it happened,” Schroeder-Lebec says. “It’s a convergence of a bunch of different things. I was a new dad. And I had already felt like, on tour, things were getting difficult. There was some going through the motions, maybe not as much openness and conversation—not to say that I would have wanted that or was equipped to do it, but I could tell I was losing a little bit of myself and what I enjoyed about the process to begin with. But rather than sit down and have some open conversations about a gradual way to get that back, I was like, ‘I’m a new dad, I need a job.’

“Working in bars in Chicago had presented itself as an opportunity, and that kind of money and regularity quickly became the foundation that I wanted to provide. I had to make some decisions, because I knew that I would never be able to go on the road in the way that I needed to. Even with some distance, I would probably find myself in a position of saying no more than yes. I was like, ‘This is what I’ve got to do for now.’ I remember feeling at the time that it made sense. I had all my reasons.”

And all those reasons led him to a positive and stable professional life, one in which SchroederLebec has continued to thrive over the past 15 years. “I was bartending and doing the program at one [bar] pretty much ASAP, and coming out of touring professionally, jumping into adult

parenthood stuff, was what I needed. If it [had been] a boring stiff job, I don’t know that that would have been the case, but it did check off some of the boxes: community, nightlife. It’s been a lot of fun. There’s a lot of creativity to it.

I do it in a larger way now; I manage three restaurants/bars in the city. It’s something that I’ve become more invested in over time, although now they get to see me go back on tour more.”

Pelican didn’t falter, precisely—guitarist Dallas Thomas of the Swan King had been filling in for Schroeder-Lebec onstage, and he took on a full-time role once it was clear that SchroederLebec needed the space to work out his own path—but all the members’ growing responsibilities meant that the band’s recorded output slowed from their reliably biannual schedule.

Forever Becoming arrived in 2013, four years after What We All Come to Need, and the admittedly difficult and protracted sessions for Nighttime Stories didn’t bear fruit for another six years. Still, Pelican were evolving, sounding as strong as ever.

“Dallas is a great guitar player and fit right in just at the right time,” says bassist Bryan Herweg.

“He came from more of a classic metal background and playing style. So, I think our music started to reflect that on Nighttime Stories. I learned a lot playing with him. I never had any traditional training on bass and he helped me a lot.”

Bryan’s brother, drummer Larry Herweg, has a similarly enthusiastic take on the way Thomas helped to steady Pelican’s flight plan. “Dallas is a rad guitar player and he did an amazing job coming into the band, learning our songs and trying to keep Laurent’s parts as close as possible. The writing process with Dallas was different and a lot of songs were done in pieces/ sections. We did a lot of back-and-forth file sharing for those two albums. It wasn’t always as

THERE’S A RESONANCE TO THE CREATIVE PARTNERSHIP OF THESE FOUR PEOPLE THAT FEELS VERY SPECIFIC AND SCRATCHES A VERY SPECIFIC ITCH IN EACH OF US. BEING ABLE TO REDISCOVER THAT AND REEXAMINE IT AND DELVE INTO IT HAS BEEN INCREDIBLY REWARDING. [AND] WE REALIZE HOW FLEETING THESE OPPORTUNITIES CAN BE.

THAT’S THE ‘FLICKERING’ ASPECT OF THE RESONANCE. TREVOR DE BRAUW

• :J U NPE T2E0M2B 5 E•R D2E0C L ECIBEL 46 SE 2 3I B:ED

smooth as we’d all like it to be, but I am proud of the albums we did with Dallas.”

PINING FOR EVER

Ten years is too long a time to encapsulate in a

few meager sentences or a few minutes of interview time, and Schroeder-Lebec isn’t interested in hashing out all the details anyway. What matters now are the ways that he realized he missed having Pelican in his life, and what he did about it.

“In the end,” he laments about his attempts to fill that musical hole in his life, “you can only DJ so many times and buy so many records. At some point, the part of you that feels compelled to write is going to want to get back into doing it. For those of us who want to be in that part of our brains, it’s what completes you as a human being. At some point the muse is just like, ‘What are you doing?’”

And while de Brauw has occasionally found a separate creative voice in more experimental and droning directions with solo records in 2017 and 2020, when Schroeder-Lebec goes to the well, he draws Pelican riffs every time. “I’m not the type of musician who’s got six or seven bands,” he says. “I tried a couple things that were fun here and there, but whenever I would find myself writing riffs, I couldn’t get away from that type of tonality, that structure. The longing then becomes wanting to hear those parts with those guys on them. Otherwise, it was a bust.

“And sometimes… that damn algorithm! ‘Oh fuck, really? A Pelican song’s going to come up in my feed?’ That was always very emotional.

Sometimes it would be a live video, and I would have these visceral pangs of needing to be back onstage. I slowly tried to rekindle friendships, relationships with the guys.

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Eventually the opportunity presented itself for doing some live shows. It’s good that we gave it the time that we gave it, because you can’t just jump back into these things, as much as I wanted to.”

But, as Schroeder-Lebec reportedly commented to de Brauw early in the re-entry process, “This is not the band I left.” It wasn’t.

Playing styles had developed, tightened. New compositional approaches had taken hold. A decade further down the line, Pelican had new things to say and new ways to say them.

“There’s some rapprochement between Bryan and Larry, for sure,” Schroeder-Lebec continues, “starting with What We All Come to Need, with the bass coming to the forefront much more, and certainly that relationship between Trevor and Bryan and Larry continuing to evolve in the Dallas era. In terms of all their musical abilities and how gelled and together everything felt, it was a pleasure to be back and writing. Now I describe [Pelican] to others as a book that continued to be written, and I was a character that was like, ‘Guess what! I sprang back to life!’”

FINDING THE PULSE, AGAIN

“When Laurent came back, again, at [exactly]

the right time,” Bryan Herweg says, “we just sort of locked back into our old more punk, play-by-ear kind of writing style. Laurent had a lot of material, which was helpful for me because, coming out of COVID, I wasn’t feeling that creative. Laurent inspired me immensely, and it suddenly felt like the songs were just falling into place, like they did in the old days.

It was a great feeling.”

His brother Larry offers further insight into how that old chemistry stirred new life. “I feel like Laurent has a very unique style of playing and songwriting. Early in the band and even now, a lot of the song ideas spawn from him. Laurent will show up with seven-minute riff road maps that we add our personal touches to with some minimal editing. We all grew up playing music together, so there is a natural chemistry we all have when we collaborate. We’ve gotten more mature as we get older, and we can see it with how we all work together. It’s all very harmonious, which wasn’t always the case in the past.”

Bryan also hints at some of the ways that Schroeder-Lebec’s return gave the band opportunities to blend what they had become with its dormant roots. “I personally felt a lot of nostalgia just having Laurent back in the band. That made me start to think about what inspired me to play music in the first place. All our time at the Fireside Bowl in Chicago, where we met, really shaped our music. Those days it didn’t matter what kind of music you played; the shows were a combination of all styles from the Chicago punk scene. Hardcore, emo, metal, indie, [and] ska would all be booked on one show. I was exposed to so many styles I wouldn’t have listened to • :J U NPE T2E0M2B 5 E•R D2E0C L ECIBEL 48 SE 2 3I B:ED

otherwise. Remembering those shows—and revisiting many of those bands now—helped shape my approach to the new material.”

“This one felt truly collaborative,” says Schroeder-Lebec. “Collaboration was an unspoken, but immediate grounding element. There was no attachment to one particular sound or thread. It felt really open. It was certainly touching to see how, in getting back to writing new stuff, a lot of it was quick and brought me back to some of those feels from the early era of Trevor and I sitting with our acoustic guitars, working on parts endlessly on the porch. After the first couple songs, it became clear that there was a tonality that was starting to pop up again in the songs. It reminded me of some of the early melodies, but maybe played with the rhythmic approach that defines the later era of the band.”

It feels possibly redundant, but important to land this particular point: Flickering Resonance bears the familiar markers of the sound Pelican have been carving for themselves over the past six records, but it also erupts with colorful passages—bright melodic leads, translucent harmonic overlays, unexpected notes lurking inside spidery faux repetitions—that feel like a band exploring avenues they’ve only recently discovered. Opener “Gulch” crackles with what feels like dawn’s first rays falling with the weight of the entire star… though when we mention the implied daybreak motif, de Brauw chuckles.

“Next tour, we’re going to have to look at only doing morning shows. That would be fun—you finish a show at noon, hit the road, drive to the next city, load in, then get some sleep and show up bright and early for soundcheck, and by 9 a.m., you’ve got it going.”

From there, the songs tend to growl aggressively on the front end, only to make space later for wider vistas and grander gestures. This is no Fire in Our Throats vision quest, but neither is Flickering Resonance the howling strife behind its direct predecessor, Nighttime Stories. “Our last album is purely about grief and outrage,” de Brauw explains. “It wholly manifested as that. If it’s not our darkest album, it’s certainly one of the darkest projects that we’ve done. This album is very different. It’s rooted in that sense of camaraderie and friendship and the gratitude for this creative exercise. Also, three of us are parents, and [Flickering Resonance is also about] being able to explore the world through the eyes of a child and all that naivete and the joy of being alive.”

Larry concurs: “I feel like the new album just came together a little easier than Nighttime Stories. The new songs were falling into place quicker and brought back some of the mellower/ melodic moments that were missing on Nighttime Stories. I like both albums for different reasons, but I feel like the new one has more moods, whereas the last album leaned mostly heavy with darker vibes.”

The album takes its title from a mashup of two of its songs, “Specific Resonance”—which, again, refers to the creative force wielded by this particular quartet of musicians—and “Flickering Stillness,” a pensive late-album grower that develops another of the record’s broader themes. As de Brauw points out, “It harkens back to the idea of flame meditation and losing yourself in the primal [quality] of that.”

“We’re not meditation experts,” SchroederLebec reminds us, “but we listen to the songs and think, ‘What do these mean to me? What are words that represent what this song means to us?’ We start digging and looking around inside.

I think I said, ‘flickering… something,’ and then Bryan added the word ‘stillness,’ and cool, that’s it. That’s the one that’s going to work.”

“That song title happened without attaching it to a song,” says de Brauw, “but it sounded right for that particular composition. I don’t think we wrote that song to explore that idea. Most of these songs are intuitive in nature and don’t necessarily have themes that are directly expressible. While the song titles express specific ideas, the connection of the song titles to the songs is a little bit harder to explain with any sense of specificity, just because the ideas or emotions being expressed by the song are things that exist outside of the realm of spoken language.”

SPECKS OF LIGHT, STRUNG UP IN THE SKY

This interplay between the earthy crunch of Pelican’s chosen sound with the more ethereal concepts that flare up around the edges of these songs provided the inspiration for the album’s stunningly vibrant cover art. Christian Degn Petersen, who also provided imagery for Pelican’s 2024 proof-of-life EP Adrift/Tending the Embers as well as Scarcity’s The Promise of Rain and Petersen’s own black metal project Moray, expresses himself primarily in black and white, but he took on the challenge of bringing color to his world at Pelican’s request.

“The introduction of color on this piece was initially a bit daunting at first,” Petersen says.

“I tried to think of layering my colors similar to woodblock prints from Japan. I knew I wanted the sky to feel somewhat psychedelic to match some of the writing on the album, and I wanted it to feel like a sunrise or maybe sunset, thus the violets, blues and oranges.

“I regularly go on hikes in a canyon not far from my home here in Provo [Utah]. On one of these hikes, I was struck by the presence of a particular cliff face as the sun began to set. I noticed the way this orange light casting upon the contours and striations almost gave the stone the appearance of a massive tidal wave of flame engulfing everything. I snapped a quick picture and knew instantly that this mountain I’ve walked by hundreds of times would serve as a

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IN THE END, YOU CAN ONLY DJ SO MANY TIMES AND BUY SO MANY RECORDS.

AT SOME POINT, THE PART OF YOU THAT FEELS COMPELLED TO WRITE IS GOING TO WANT TO GET BACK INTO DOING IT. LAURENT SCHROEDER-LEBEC

basin to a sky of wandering embers and a central flame which would hold our attention. The main challenge turns into trying to chisel something vague into something that is specific and deeply knowable. It's a driving interest I hope will allow me to translate technical skill into works that can convey emotional truths.”

Petersen also mentions his discussions about flame meditation with members of Pelican, and how he was able to implement this concept within his artistic vision. “I wanted the imagery to feel somewhat surreal, enough to provoke deeper contemplation, but not so obtuse as to be impenetrable or inaccessible. I see the central flame as our guidepost, with the surrounding flames as sort of distracting thoughts that the ‘Wandering Mind’ [the album’s final song] might try to deliver us or latch onto as we attempt to find silence in our minds. I chose to keep these flames sequestered to the sky, and not portray any in the foreground and bisecting the hills. I wanted them to feel almost as if they are coming up from behind the mountain, rather than embers coming off from some camper's fire. I was also inspired by depictions of flames in medieval manuscripts, and the flattening of the landscape that tends to occur in these old illuminations.”

Schroeder-Lebec praises Petersen’s work for its full integration within—and elevation of— the band’s musical goals. “There’s something about a person hand-painting something, in this day and age. That landscape is real, and he hand-drew it. That’s really the end goal: This is something that feels genuine. It’s one of those rare instances where he captures the magnitude of what we want to portray sonically, but also the very real natural beauty of what we want to have our music represent, and the humanity of it. I think we are more dialed into our UENPET2E0M2B5E•R D2E0C 5 0• :J S 2 3I B:EDL E C I B E L

positivity than our negativity, in terms of what [role] music plays in our lives.”

GETTING LABELED

In the early 2000s, any loud guitar band playing

distorted riffs was going to get immediately filed under “metal” because the human mind is nothing if not efficient when it comes to the abject reduction and flattening of any intellectual or emotional space. It was expected but maddening in a time and place where musical boundaries were being gleefully ignored, to the benefit of everyone involved.

“When we started the band,” de Brauw says, “we were playing shows in the hardcore punk scene. I don’t know if we labeled ourselves as punk or hardcore—I probably did because I thought everything I did was punk—but those are our roots. ‘Punk’ didn’t refer to a specific style of music. It was a specific style of doing things and not being afraid of experimenting, not being afraid of failure. It was about embracing creativity for the sake of it, outside of the traditional definitions of success.”

“Pretty early on,” Schroeder-Lebec says, “we were lumped in with doom, stoner rock and heavier, sludgy things. Which is fine, because that certainly appealed for us; they were some of the bands we were into and we could see ourselves playing with. But we could see ourselves playing with anyone. That’s the culture you come up with in Chicago—you are going to go see a bunch of different bands together and you might get into something you weren’t planning on getting into. Those are the bills that came through. They were very diverse. For us, it was almost second nature.”

They both frequently refer to their ties to Chicago’s Fireside Bowl and Brian Peterson,

“who booked a lot of our early shows,” de Brauw tells us. “His whole booking philosophy was to throw everything in a blender, and whatever happens happens. You’d have a metal band coming through on tour and the local band that happens to be available is a ska band. We saw all of these scenes as intersecting. Even when the overlap didn’t necessarily work, we all viewed ourselves as being on the same mission—it was all about unbridled creativity and trying to create a space for community that was outside of the mainstream, that would be accepting to fellow weirdos like ourselves.”

When Pelican opened for Isis and met Aaron Turner, they established a connection to Hydra Head Records’ likeminded audionauts with a similar punk disposition and a disregard for genre rules. “They were a hardcore label, but people called them a metal label. I guess they called themselves ‘Thinking Man’s Metal,’ but that was very clearly a joke. It was a bunch of hardcore bands that were approaching their art with interest in things that were outside of the scene, or outside of [those] rigid traditional rule structures of what hardcore could be.”

Three albums later, Pelican turned to another friend to release their upcoming work. “Larry had been super happy with his experience doing Lair of the Minotaur records with Southern Lord,” de Brauw says of their late ’00s switch.

“We were all fans of the label and friends with Greg [Anderson], so we just approached him and asked him, and he was very into it. I think a lot of the decisions that we’ve made in this band have been more driven by friendship and relationships than any sort of strategizing. We’ve had the opportunity to do shirt designs with friends, album art with friends, and had our friends put our music out into the world.

DECIBEL : JUNE 2025 : 51

It comes back to that sense that the reason we got into underground music is to be a part of a community. That’s how we’ve always operated.”

Schroeder-Lebec tries to get out in front of any suggestion that choosing a different record label has negative connotations: “Springboards like changing labels don’t always have to be viewed as dark decisions or the end result of acrimony or anything like that. It felt like some change could have been beneficial, and when that presented itself as an option, it was like, ‘Maybe this is the change that we’re looking for.’”

And now, with three more records and another 15 years under their belt, with the original lineup reunited and joyfully creating together, it felt right to join forces with East Coast weirdo-celebrants Run for Cover Records.

“Conversations with them felt inspiring and reminiscent of early excitement and intrigue around some of those early combos with Hydra Head,” says Schroeder-Lebec. “They tie back to being from the East Coast and having a general awareness of [Converge, Cave In, Isis, etc.], that style and that sound and that particular time.

The diversity of the roster meeting that enthusiasm from them felt like a place we could call home.”

“One of the things that was very appealing about it,” de Brauw adds, “is that they are part of this current wave of hardcore bands that are embracing stylistic diversity, hardcore bands that are not rigid traditionalists where they feel they need to sound like ’81 L.A., but they’re willing to explore melody and emotion. I feel a real

U ENPET2E0M2B5 E•R D2E0C 5 2• :J S 2 3I B:EDL E C I B E L

sense of kinship with that scene. It has a lot to do with where we came from, so there’s a real shared vocabulary with the folks at the label.”

Label founder Jeff Casazza grew up outside of Boston, and he “moved to the city in 2004 when bands like Converge, Old Man Gloom, Isis, and Hydra Head Records were at the forefront of the metal music scene here. Starting out, I just wanted to work with cool hardcore bands. After putting out a few releases and seeing the label keep itself afloat, I decided to throw out a larger net in terms of the types of bands I worked with.

Trying to work with hardcore bands got difficult because there was a lot of competition, labelwise, in the early 2000s. Instead, I cast a wider net in terms of genres I wanted to work with, and it became more about finding great young bands who needed help, and didn’t necessarily have labels after them yet.”

Run for Cover were happy to establish a working relationship with Pelican after de Brauw reached out, and Casazza is excited about Flickering Resonance. “I think it’s all the best parts of Pelican,” he says. “This album captures the melodic elements, the heavy elements, and everything in between in an extremely concise way.”

A DELICATE SENSE OF BALANCE

Which means all systems are go for Pelican to stride bravely forward into this new era. “I’m 47 and I still take the band very seriously,” says Larry Herweg. “Pelican has been such a huge part of my life, and it changed me for the better.

I get to spend time, travel the world and be creative with my brother and best friends. It is a lot of work, but like parenting, it’s always rewarding in the end. I put a lot of effort and heart into what we do.”

Touching again on the feelings that ushered Flickering Resonance into being, de Brauw says, “There’s a heightened awareness of the fleeting quality of life and the fleeting quality of having a creative outlet. So many of the bands that we came up with have a lifespan of five years or something like that. Most of our peers who play in bands don’t have the same opportunities that we have, so I think there’s a very grounded awareness of how fortunate we are. We try to pay reverence to that by playing music that speaks to that, reverence for the friendship that we share and our sincere gratitude that we have this outlet.”

And Schroeder-Lebec, having long ago made the difficult decision to separate himself from this band he helped define—and then the much less difficult decision to reconnect—communicates his own deepening appreciation for Pelican’s place in his life. “I’m trying to approach it with some understanding of the gravity of this gift, that I get to come back and do something like this. It feels pretty special.

I’m trying to learn from what may have happened [in the past], and just be a better version of who that musician was—not on a technical level, but just as a human being. I’m trying to be that dude who listens and participates, really celebrating the moments when we get to come together and do this.”

DECIBEL : JUNE 2025 : 53

54 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

INSIDE ≥

56 BENEDICTION The empire strikes blah 56 BLEED Don't care where just far away 57 BRUTAL SPINCTER Put on anal blast 58 CAUSTIC WOUND Hurts so good 60 HERSIR Dark mid-evil times

Towards the Sinister

JUNE

47

Future potential Mastodon guitarists

25

Future potential Hacktivist bassists

47

Future potential Katatonia guitarists

0

Musicians willing to work with that guy from Gel

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

On just their second record, TRIBUNAL move closer to doom metal’s elite

T 9

ribunal’s new album, In Penitence and Ruin, is a spectacularly pertinent post-deep dive into The Requiem Metal Podcast’s two-part hidden ’90s death/doom extravaganza.

In it, the hosts—curation master Albert Mudrian and myself— TRIBUNAL wax nerdily (and into oblivion) about all things obscure, from In Penitence and Ruin Unholy, Avernus and Saturnus to Paramaecium, Dissolving of 20 BUCK SPIN Prodigy and Mythological Cold Towers. Somehow, Canadians Tribunal fit like a corpse in a coffin, an unlikely decades-later insertion into the notso-silent stream of obscure deathly doom. ¶ That said, Decibel weren’t shy about our fondness for Tribunal’s debut, The Weight of Remembrance, which placed at #16 on our Top 40 Albums of 2023. We apparently have a softie for left-of-center metals, especially when they’re slowed down, rife with melancholy and bereft of (mostly symphonic) bombast. The Vancouver band—now a five-piece, adding guitarist Jessica Yang, keyboardist Dallas Alice and drummer Julia Geaman as full-time members—delivers another massive tombstone hit to the head on In Penitence and Ruin. Immediate comparisons to

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

DECIBEL : JUNE 2025 : 55

Hall of Famers My Dying Bride (as well as Novembers Doom and SubRosa) are inevitable, but as the album plays out, it’s not quite as obvious as to who is inflecting influence.

Vocally, Soren Mourne is cut from the same contralto cloth as Farida Lemouchi (the Devil’s Blood), Rosalie Cunningham (ex-Purson) and, at times, Merja Salmela (Unholy). She’s dark like a foggy cemetery and smoky as funeral parlor incense. Tribunal could’ve turned on the princess/ frog tandem vocal thing and gone upward operatically, but instead, she (along with guitarist Etienne Flinn) ventures downward. Opening track “Incarnadine” rolls out Mourne’s cello, a hearsein-reverse tempo, and when appropriate, Flinn’s tortured howls. This isn’t rug-cutting doom-death.

The grooves are under the surface. Tribunal always swan into someone’s unfortunate processional, scoring it filmically and unapologetically.

This narrative folds into “A Wound Unhealing,” with its gesture to vintage Paradise Lost, and “The Sword of the Slain,” a heavy-bottomed, headnodding proclamation to the godless masses.

“The Penitent” is more forceful. Mourne and Flinn attack ceremonial airs with directness while the rest of their ensemble pile on the hurt. “Armoured in Shadow” has an infectious Solitude Aeturnus gait, but it devolves, thanks to Flinn’s venom-flinging, into blackened doom territory. Certainly, any doom-death album worth its weight in mausoleum granite closes things out with a proper egress. “Between the Sea and Stars” lurches into the sunset, the dual cry of Flinn and Yang’s note choices glancing off Mourne’s tribute-pregnant cello. It’s a fitting end to Tribunal’s slow burn.

In an era of instant gratification and production glitz, Tribunal’s In Penitence and Ruin runs antithetical. There’s no hit single here. It’s nearly 50 minutes. And there’s not a single gravity blast for a country mile. In short, if heady, big-chapter death-doom performed at candlelight resonates, Tribunal have one-upped Dissolving of Prodigy, Thorns of the Carrion and Morgion as if they never existed. Big words, yes. In Penitence and Ruin is all. —CHRIS DICK

AVERSED

5

Erasure of Color M-THEORY AUDIO

Everything and a full shipment of kitchen sinks

It’s cocktail roulette night! Take your favorite fruits and booze and throw them in a blender.

What’ll come out? You never know before you have a sip of each glass. It can be a delicious discovery that you’ll need to trademark, or some hideous gloop that’ll send you straight to the 56 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

toilet. That’s kind of what Aversed are doing on their second album. Except not with fruit and booze, but metal subgenres.

Fortunately, it never gets to an emergency bathroom trip, as the musicians involved are clearly talented. There is nothing to fault in the performances themselves, particularly new vocalist Sarah Hartman, who does a great job switching between clean and brutal vocals, a sort of Chaney Crabb-ish dynamic that works relatively well. No, the problem here is really the apparent randomness of it all. It’s something that plagued the band’s 2021 debut album Impermanent, and it’s become more noticeable now as they’ve become even more maximalist in their songwriting ambition. Or should we say parts-writing. There’s nothing wrong with the everything and the kitchen sink approach, but it should exhibit a clear thought process. If heterogeneity is the goal, rather than a vehicle, we have a problem.

On most of Erasure of Color, that’s precisely what it feels like—from chugging brutality to grandiose symphonic parts, from standard melodic death metal to mid-paced sappy gothfests, all topped by an assortment of shrieks, roars and clean singing from both guitarist Sungwoo Jeong and Hartman, any of these things can be happening in conjunction at any given point on any song.

Some of these parts really work well (again, Hartman is a remarkable vocalist), but none of them really feel like songs as opposed to quick lane changes to the next thing. Aversed might try being less excited about everything they can do and focus a little more on what the song can do. —JOSÉ CARLOS SANTOS

BENEDICTION

6

Ravage of Empires NUCLEAR BLAST

Barely conscious terror

Metal sidesteps the narrative arc of myriad genres by remaining a discipline best executed by adults rather than TikTok tweens, teens and twentysomethings. Legacy acts still fall victim to untouchable catalogues for the first 10 years, then two or three classics (if they’re lucky) over ensuing decades. Benediction’s ninth LP, Ravage of Empires, bears out its title easily enough.

Axe-grinders Peter Rew and Darren Brookes lurched out of the gate in 1989 behind one Mark “Barney” Greenway (Napalm Death), album bow Subconscious Terror serving up troglodyte DM. Dave Ingram became their second and longesttenured singer on sophomore release The Grand Leveller (1991), which evolves from Troglodyte to Neanderthal.

From there, it could be argued that the Birminghammers’ recorded output sums up in a pair of highlights. Grind Bastard (1998) swings the apex, fattest bastard in the bunch—best-produced, best midrange/midriffs, best tempo and temperament. 2020’s Scriptures finally matched that: beefy as sausage and brawling as 12 too many lagers. Ravage of Empires matches neither.

“A Carrion Harvest” reaps a hardcore gallop out of the gate, atop which layer like-minded riffs and rhythmic singularity lashed together under Ingram’s burly delivery, both perfectly intelligible and genre-endemic. His sighs throughout Ravage of Empires rule. “Beyond the Veil (of the Grey Mare)” syncs next, Ingram delivering Ford-tough and Chevy-heavy, but third track “Genesis Chamber” hits the wall.

A lightning bolt riff etches open this third stomper in a row, yet strangely—for a band helmed by guitarists—they never sounded like a guitar band, which they need here to cut through a tempo, production and, yes, vocal sameness that deadens the album like a doomed empire. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

BLEED

4

Bleed

20 BUCK SPIN

Get away, get away, get away

Let’s set aside the fact that this seems like a cockamamie act to be lodged within the 20 Buck Spin roster; after all, considering the number of listens that their 2022 EP Somebody’s Closer pulled on Spotify, this band may ultimately prove to be a savvy acquisition. Bleed defiantly peddle ’90s-era heavy rock retrostalgia. Their fealty to a vintage “Woodstock ’99” schematic and this album’s radio-ready, safety-scissors vibe made my initial playthroughs desperately taxing. Despite the crunchy guitars and periodic metalcore chestbeating, Bleed initially felt like a Glock that’s had its internal safety permanently soldered to “passive.” (Picture an old Tooth & Nail band aping Filter.)

After several listening sessions, my antipathy’s been softened by Bleed’s restrained but undeniable talent. Sadly, their liabilities remain sizable, resting in the group’s “Now That’s What I Call Heavy Rock” fundamentalism and (most glaringly) in singer/guitarist Ryan Hughes’ grueling lack of imagination. He injects such little passion into his performances that they sound like an afterthought. “Slip” would be a worthy Katatonia-esque banger were it not for those flatlining vocals; pull the leeches off this guy already, he’s obviously been bled enough!

Given that the band’s essentially a retro act (check that hand-me-down logo), Bleed require much more charisma in this department in order for them to feel remotely essential. Quicksand, Failure and Seaweed were/are fronted by singers with equally limited ranges, but who nonetheless provided their bands a quality of vitality and magnetism.

Obscured beneath this pasty anti-performance is a band that’s generally striking its target.

True, these songs aren’t oriented around massive fireworks; they engage on a more subtle level and may require multiple playthroughs to really sink their nubbins in. Regardless, if Bleed aim to actually draw blood, they need to shape up and/or make some really tough decisions.

—FORREST PITTS

BLOOD MONOLITH

8

The Calling of Fire P R O FO U N D LO R E

Viscera vobiscum

Modern U.S. death metal has been heaving with artistic collaborations. You’ll find many bands out there featuring members of other acts, and very few that could be classified as a circle jerk of bloated egos. There’s a fraternity to be found amongst the blasting brutality. Led by guitarist/ vocalist Shelby Lermo—whose raw-boned riffs currently ring out in Nails and Ulthar, and can be heard on releases by Vastum, Extremity and others—Blood Monolith are the latest member of Profound Lore’s respected stable of heavy and/ or experimental artists.

In addition to Lermo, this new act features some members who will be familiar to seasoned Decibel readers: Undeath guitarist Tommy Wall, Genocidal Pact bassist Michael Nolan and drummer Aidan Tydings-Lynch of death-grinders Deliriant Nerve. While adorned with signature artwork by Nick Blinko of Rudimentary Peni infamy, Blood Monolith’s debut isn’t punk outside of its energy. What you get is technically adept, yet unrestrained death metal that sounds—both musically and vocally—as though Lermo and his fellow miscreants smashed together the Barnes and Corpsegrinder eras of Cannibal Corpse and fueled their creativity by guzzling the vile combined essence.

In more contemporary terms, face-peelers like “Prayer to Crom” and “Slaughter Garden” are closer to Necrot’s attack than, say, recent Tomb Mold prog-death: punishing, gritty DM beholden to the thrash-scorched formative days, yet retaining a modern approach to technique and tone. Let’s just hope that this is not a one-off, as Blood Monolith have the potential to make a significant dent in the scene. —DEAN BROWN

BRUTAL SPHINCTER

7

Sphinct-Earth Society TIME TO KILL

Don’t you flush it out

Good Lord, this is a mess.

And I’m not just talking about the cover art depiction of the Earth’s inner core as an intestinal/bowel system. Or the fact that Brutal Sphincter self-define as “Poo-litical goregrind.”

Or that these bouncing Belgians have made it their mission to do their thing under the moniker Brutal Sphincter. Messiness indeed, but beyond the cosmetic exterior, the mess is exacerbated by how the quintet’s sense of satire is backed by sounds that make you want to hug and high-five them before the inevitable desire to launch them and their instruments into orbit on an intergalactic shit-shuttle takes over.

Brutal Sphincter may be a picnic basket filled with Birdflesh, Squash Bowels, Cock and Ball Torture and Jig-Ai CD-Rs as weaved in tandem by the dude who turns up every year at MDF in a chicken suit and the dude who turns up annually at Obscene Extreme in a pink tutu, but Sphinct-Earth Society calls out extremism, anti-vaxxers, climate change and conspiracy theorists, so mad props for that. Those props get gently reassessed when confronted by a parade of toothy grins and Day-Glo tracksuits. But, emerging from behind the teeth and sportswear are some truly ante-upping moments that nudge against Decapitated’s Nihility and Cryptopsy’s None So Vile (“Name Three Songs,” “The Prolapse of Society,” the title track).

But there are also some exceptionally dumbsounding riffs and pig grunt vocals (“The Juice Did It,” “Unvaxxed Lives Matter”) creating a palpably frustrating path, if not a fork in the road, for the listener. Sphinct-Earth Society is the kind of record you’ll want to hate, but still kinda love.

Googly-eyes will be set off at the same time you’ll be wondering where your quality control went on vacation. Make sure you’ve got plenty of toilet paper with wet wipe chasers handy, kids.

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

CANCER

7

Inverted World PEACEVILLE

Acid flashback

Popular opinion will tell you that the best version of Cancer boasted the talents of James Murphy on lead guitar, and that opinion is ably backed up by archive footage available on YouTube of the Shropshire, England O.G. death metal quartet laying waste to the U.K. club circuit in 1991.

A vintage year, we can all agree. In 2025, still

unfortunately named, but—fuck it—committed to it now, with only John Walker from the original lineup, a new Cancer album, some seven years and another fresh roster of players after their 2018 comeback, has a bit of work to do in convincing us to metaphorically step up on the wedge monitor and then leap off.

Agreeably morbid cover art from Peaceville general manager Paul Groundwell doesn’t hurt.

We’re intrigued. Neither does a little bit of fan service. Nobody would have taken Walker for a sentimentalist, but “Corrosive” is surely a callback to the super-fun “Into the Acid” from their 1990 debut, To the Gory End, and there’s nothing like some liquefying horror to melt away our froideur. And as tracks such as “Until They Died” demonstrate, Walker can pick a guitar player; Robert Navajas does some great work here.

Walker has admitted that he lost his appetite for experimentation after the mid-’90s. This post-reunion Cancer was going to give you what you wanted whether you like it or not. Okay, there’s the occasional longueur, but if you’ve been jonesing for that raw analog sound with Scott Burns vibes, riffs measuring somewhere between mid-’90s Bolt Thrower and Carcass on the brutal scale, lyrical nastiness pouring out of Walker’s throat, it’s worth your time. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

CANDLEMASS

7

Black Star N A PA L M

Starstruck

Three years removed from their last studio full-length, 2022’s Sweet Evil Sun, new Candlemass material arrives in a somewhat unusual form—a four-song EP with two covers. Any new Candlemass is better than an extended wait for their next album, but this feels more like a somewhat unsatisfying stopgap, especially since the title track is so strong, a melodic doom epic. Beyond that, the only other new material is an instrumental, “Corridors of Chaos,” that, honestly, would benefit from vocals.

It’s fine as-is, but it feels like it’s included here as an instrumental because it’s unfinished. Lead guitarist Lars Johansson adds some solos and melody lines, but it remains a bit flat.

As for the two covers—Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” and Pentagram’s “Forever My Queen”—there’s nothing especially unexpected or interesting here. They’re, once again, fine, but how many covers have we heard of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”? Feels like a lot, and this one is pretty rote. Same goes for the Pentagram track, as far as what Candlemass did with it. The covers are discouraging, yes, but the strength of “Black Star” is encouraging and hopefully bodes well for what’s to come. —ADEM TEPEDELEN DECIBEL : JUNE 2025 : 57

CAUSTIC WOUND

9

Grinding Mechanism of Torment P R O FO U N D LO R E

Come for the grinding, stay for the torment

On their second full-length, Grinding Mechanism of Torment, does Caustic Wound still sound like a lot of other bands? They really do, mostly deathgrind from the late-’80s/early-’90s. And honestly, it’s pretty hard to find anything wrong with that.

A major, often legitimate, complaint about throwbacks is they’re overly focused on creating a faithful rendition of their heroes instead of just making good songs. And while it’s true that this band (featuring members of Mortiferum and Magrudergrind) retains fidelity to a certain era, you don’t need a PhD in Scott Burns to enjoy these 16 tracks, which rarely stretch beyond two minutes.

As far as musicianship, the best example is the closing track, where drummer Casey Moore fullon blasts without variation for over two and a half minutes; an arm-numbing feat that highlights what the band is capable of. But while the drums are fast, the vocals are almost too guttural for the audible spectrum and the bass may have been recorded in a sewer, it’s really about the riffs.

There is a veritable cornucopia of catchy, brutal riffs and screeching solos, with production that makes everything surprisingly crisp and welldefined. There’s also a first-ballot pick for this year’s best “when the riff comes back, but slower.”

If you like Roadrunner albums from the first Bush administration, Grinding Mechanism of Torment is something you’ll appreciate. And honestly, even if you don’t like those records, maybe you just need a band like Caustic Wound to bring you into the fold. —SHANE MEHLING

CHEMICIDE

8

Violence Prevails LISTENABLE

It beats sadness

N.B.: Should a thrash band come onto your, or any, radar waving a flag from any of the 45 nations comprising Latin and South America, know that there’s a Fibonacci sequence probability that said band is going to be toys-in-the-attic, if not batshit, crazy. This is not meant as disparagement.

Heck, the only individuals that deserve to be disparaged, chastised and looked down upon in this context are those who wouldn’t want their thrash to be as off the charts as possible!

Chemicide hail from San José, Costa Rica.

Violence Prevails, their fifth album, is not only seeking to capitalize upon the band’s homegrown success, but one that falls into the above designation like a glove. To wit: the closing track 58 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

being a 78-second slice of call-and-response punk mayhem (originally by Los Crudos) called “That’s Right, We’re That Spic Band!!!” And instead of doing a Metallica cover most would give a flying fuck about, they blasted up the tempo for a chaotic rendition of “72 Seasons.” Total nutbars!

When it comes to the meat of the matter, Violence Prevails is feral thrash that gnaws and gnashes on the bones left behind by the heroes of ’80s Germany (particularly Kreator) and ’00s Brazil (particularly Violator). The barbarity of “Do as I Say, Not as I Do,” “Systemic Decay” and “Chokehold” are bolstered by an old-school production quality that highlights bright guitar galloping, Nuclear Assault levels of bass prominence, staccato vocal gut jabs and a teetering-onthe-brink sensibility that is very obviously not restrained by a click track.

However, even as the band sounds like a bunch of starving mongooses let loose in a Caribbean snake pit, they temper their sonic derangement with tight arrangements and bunches of skillful melodic soloing straight from the Bay Area’s heyday. A striking balance of grit and grace, grime and grandeur, psychosis and polish. Listen hard, my friends. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

DESERTED FEAR

8

Veins of Fire TESTIMONY

Big bang, baby

There are too many death metal albums. More than anyone could possibly keep up with. Every week, another batch drops, many claiming to be the next big thing—game-changers, boundarypushers, whatever overblown nonsense the press release says. And usually? They’re OK. Not bad, not great, just… another death metal album. But Veins of Fire? It rips. Deserted Fear aren’t here to reinvent the wheel; they’re here to smash your face into it. No filler, no detours—just pure, high-impact modern death metal.

From the first seconds of “Into the Burning Lands,” the riffs hit like concrete slabs. The drums drive with intent. Manuel “Mahne” Glatter’s vocals? Big, commanding, genuinely emotional without sounding like some dude faking a breakdown. Halfway through, I started thinking: Is this going to start blending together? It’s a risk with an album this relentless.

But this ain’t Deserted Fear’s first rodeo. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, they pull a fast one—a hook that sticks, a tempo shift that grabs you or, in the case of the title track, a slow-burn build-up that actually pays off. And when it hits, it hits. That’s the thing. It’s not bloated. It’s not pretentious. It’s just good. The emotional weight of Evergrey, the anthemic bite of Amon Amarth, the relentless punch of

Gatecreeper. Whether you’re crushing a workout, stuck in traffic or just in the mood for something that rips without needing to think too hard, this is an album built for repeat listens. And would somebody give the uncredited synth player a hand? The atmospheric touches here are so tasteful I almost didn’t notice—but once I did, I couldn’t unhear how much they add.

Do you need another death metal album in your life? Probably not. But are you going to spin this more than you care to admit? Yeah, probably. Nicely done, Deserted Fear—enjoy your victory. —TIM MUDD

ELUVEITIE

7

Anv

NUCLEAR BLAST

Everything remains (as it never was)

This is the third time I’ve reviewed an Eluveitie album for this magazine.

I was hot on them in 2010, less so in 2014. Pagan metal has been a thing for 20-plus years now, and while it may seem silly to expect something new from a genre literally based on centuries-old music, it’d sure help keep it from feeling centuries old. Eluveitie’s Slania came out in 2008. It was one of the high points of the genre, but it’s hard to get excited about this stuff anymore. At the end of the day, though, they’re not gonna suddenly turn into ambient death metal.

Anv continues the cycle started on their last record, 2019’s Ategnatos. Vocalist Chrigel Glanzman remains the steady hand at the helm, overseeing a truly astonishing number of members, but the lineup has remained fairly consistent for the last few records. So has their sound. To Eluveitie’s credit, they’ve played with the formula, putting out melodeath-focused and acoustic albums, and that versatility shows.

“The Prodigal Ones” plays with some chunky quasi-industrial rhythms, “Taranoias” does some work in the soil, “Awen” does the whole symphonic metal thing. Just with hurdy-gurdys instead of an orchestra.

Overall, it’s hard to find much fault with this.

Solid songwriting, solid performances. It’s just hard to shake off that feeling of familiarity, and it doesn’t have big enough hooks or sick enough riffs to get past that. So… meh. We’ll see how I feel on go-round number four. —JEFF TREPPEL

GHÖRNT

6

Bluetgraf SOULSELLER

Nocturnal animals

What we have here are black metal songs about vampires and local legends, and you can sing along to them

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if you’re of a mind to, just so long as you can wrap yourself around the local lingo. This Swiss duo writes and performs these tracks in Luzern, a dialect of Swiss-German. This adds to the romance of it all, anchoring the sound in a sense of place, and Luzern is a beautiful lakeside medieval town that you could imagine as a regional hotspot for after-dark vampiric misadventure.

As the supernatural’s great romantics, vampires are drawn to such settings, and perhaps also to those in the monochromatic cover art, which could be described as a “Transilvanian Hunger at the Christmas market” snowglobe aesthetic. Ghörnt craft seesawing melodies to lead their melancholy—faintly gothic?— compositions by the nose through some familiar second-wave black metal sounds, but that’s no great crime.

The slow/mid-tempo grind of “Jagd,” the microtonal necro fire of “Hass” and the grandiose, musically tricksy “Vlad” are all examples of how familiarity isn’t always so contemptible in this game, particularly when the volume is dimmed. No way is anyone thinking ill of Ghörnt when they’ve pushed the needle into the red for “Hass,” throwing everything at it. These cats can certainly play. Trouble is, Bluetgraf’s musical highlights enjoy a short half-life in the memory, paling into disquieting thoughts that we would rather be listening to Marduk or Funeral Mist or any one of those other black metal bands operating in this style who have that uncanny knack of serving up premier cru material that seeps into the bones, brain and soul. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

HERSIR

6

Hateful Draugar From the Underground DARKNESS SHALL RISE

Viking it.

Liking (some of) it.

Swedes Hersir, featuring members of black metallers Domgård, begin their journey from demolings on their Darkness Shall Rise debut, Hateful Draugar From the Underground. Cut right from Norwegian black metal of the early ’90s (say, 1992-1995) with elements of maligned Swedish ichor, the quartet trem and blah-riff into our heart of hearts. To wit, sophistication is stripped in favor of a DIY framework, the likes of which are uneven parts mid-period Satyricon (the title track, “The Ironclad Fighters of Hjaðningavíg”) and Motörhead (“Holocaust Winter”), with occasional keyboard sprites (think: Enslaved’s “Lifandi Lif Undir Hamri”) for atmospheric measure.

While the old head in me wants to love everything about Hateful Draugar, it’s devoid of the magic of the halcyon days, and on the current timeline, it hangs upside down for the sake 60 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

of doing so. Most of the nine tracks (opener “Dauðvána” is an instrumental) plod along: evil in nature, but sonic redundancy in disposition. Not that Grim Vindkall and Haugbúi have instrumentally gone astray or aren’t up to the task—in fact, they’re more than capable—but apart from the excellent “The Fiddler” and the occasional oar tip to vintage Enslaved, they rest on a flatline.

Hateful Draugar From the Underground is neither necro nor next-tier—just somewhere in the middle, and that’s not an envious position when the world needs firebrands and/or firestarters. Looking for (Swedish) black metal with more bite? Search out Ondskapt, Valkyrja and yes, the latest barnstormer by veterans Marduk. —CHRIS DICK

IRON LUNG

8

Adapting // Crawling IRON LUNG

Sick, bro

Iron Lung know what they like and what they don’t like. This declaration sits atop the Bandcamp site for Iron Lung Records, and lends the Seattle duo’s local “What We Like” fests their name. It might sound arrogant, but it’s really a statement of fact that handily sums up the label and the band’s new LP. Any given ILR release could be a contemporary hardcore punk ripper, but could just as likely be death metal, noise or a reissue of an obscure post-punk album that these two guys dig. Adapting // Crawling, Iron Lung’s first album in 12 years, finds the band titrating the most potent sounds of classic powerviolence and surgically slicing away all traces of fat like the shadowy medical professionals who populate their lyrics.

Eighteen songs, 21 minutes. They’ve got the compact structures and burly riffing of Crossed Out, and bursts of No Comment’s subtle dissonance (see “Shift Work”), delivered with the apoplectic rage of Despise You. Yes, there are noise interludes, and the drums sound like they were recorded in a cavern. Guitarist Jon Kortland and drummer Jensen Ward bellow lyrics, often in unison, à la Man Is the Bastard. Look, doctrinaire powerviolence like this is not going to have a wide variety of musical reference points, okay?

It’s the ideas that make Iron Lung unique.

Turns out that years-long twin pandemics of deadly disease and misinformation are ripe material for their particular obsessions. The lyrics render the last five years as microfiction repeatedly invoking futility, isolation and the lonely end of life, reaching conceptual apex with “Purgatory Dust // Virus,” in which one song is “infected” by the other before briefly returning to cough out a death rattle. —ANTHONY BARTKEWICZ

THE LORD WEIRD SLOUGH FEG

8

Traveller Supplement I: The Ephemeral Glades CRUZ DEL SUR

Set the controls

Putting on a Slough Feg record is like traveling back in time. You should almost have to play this on vinyl, because it reeks (in the best possible way) of some indistinct time when that was your only option. This is only part of the enduring charm of the band, because vocalist/guitarist Mike Scalzi and crew never rely entirely on some contrived retro vibe. They just use that analog aesthetic (whether literal or not) to craft their galloping, twin-guitar proto-metal into something timeless.

And speaking of such things, on this sevensong EP, the quartet reached back in time to follow up the storyline crafted on 2003’s Traveller even recording it in the same studio with the same producer, Justin Weis. But you don’t need to know that album or the story to appreciate The Ephemeral Glades. The pleasure lies in the well-crafted, slightly proggy tunes and the exemplary playing, particularly the guitar interplay between Scalzi and Angelo Tringali. There’s more entertainment value here in 23 minutes than a lot of bands manage in twice that. Quality over quantity always wins. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

MELVINS 1983

6

Thunderball IPECAC

Something from the meat case, Linda?

Anybody that has any experience with Melvins knows that when they drop a new slab, not even Magellan himself could comprehend the sonic journey it may contain— or who might be a co-conspirator on it. Thunderball is no different. In fact, it’s not even a Melvins record. It’s a Melvins 1983 record. The album features King Buzzo on guitar, bass and vocals, and original Melvins tub-thumper Mike Dillard on drums. Void Manes contributes noise and “creepy machine vocals,” while Ni Maîtres provides more noise, upright bass and “hand gestures.” The result? Oh, it’s a Melvins record all right.

Thunderball’s opening track “King of Rome” starts out fairly inviting. It’s short and punchy, and Buzzo’s gargantuan guitar tone opens your eardrums wide while his patented proselytizing vocal style lets you know you’re in the right place. There’s even a little melody laced into the chorus to soften you up. Then, after a few minutes of electronic throbbing, swelling and other digital flagellations from “Vomit of Clarity,” the center of Thunderball unfurls with three lengthy tracks.

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“Short Hair With a Wig” has a measured, crawling doom to it. There’s lots of space in the song for some Melvins percussive kookiness, but Dillard plays it straight. Aside from a little tempo uptick on one section of “Victory of the Pyramids,” Thunderball carries on with a weighted molasses dirge for most of the duration.

Sadly, Void Manes and Ni Maîtres’ noise additions don’t add much atmosphere. It just sounds like a gaggle of confused and neurotic droids swirling around Buzzo and Dillard in the studio.

Thunderball is Melvins’ 31st full-length release. In terms of prolificness, they’re no Willie Nelson, but that’s a helluva lot of records for a band that formed in 1983. If you consider that Melvins have no boundaries when it comes to a specific style, producing that much music in a 42-year span is not too far-fetched.

—ARIS HUNTER WALES

MOON DESTROYS

7

She Walks

by Moonlight

MOON DESTROYS/ L I M I T E D FA N FA R E

Dropping the torche

Some of y’all are too young to remember the ’90s, when every other middle-aged punker and metal veteran formed a twang band in acknowledgment of both Hank Williams and, indeed, middle age. Voilà, alt-country. Today, another generation of midlife metallurgists revisits premillennial alt-rock with a trve heart and kvlt sentiment, applicable handily enough to Juan Montoya.

Formerly of Torche and MonstrO, said shredder and ex-Royal Thunder kit man Evan Diprima initiated Moon Destroys’ discography in March 2020 with a pair of EPs: brawny hellion Stallone Demos 2009 and nervy grunger Maiden Voyage.

Joined anew by frontman Charlie Suárez and Sunday Driver bassist Arnold Nese, the Atlantans now double their output on full-length She Walks in Moonlight, nine lunar peltings in 32 minutes.

Acoustic axe sets the tone on the minute-long opening title cut, after which Great American Songbook offshoot “The Nearness of June” whines and throbs like Mother Love Bone matured instead of dying. The succeeding “Only” flirts with the L-word, too, as the pinched, nasal yearning of Suárez debuts his vocal signature in earnest, bristling and brooding like John Frusciante playing along to the Cult’s Love.

Remember the Flaming Lips’ installations from ’94/’95 when their 1,000-point light shows hit the switch like Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation?

“Set Them Free” might. Twinge of Jane’s Addiction: “Losing Sleep.” Having witnessed every alt-fart of the Beavis and Butt-Head decade—save for passing not once, but twice on Francis Bean’s sugar daddy—this hata would sooner immolate 62 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

via Greta Van Fleet than revisit a single note of Gish. For exactly that reason, She Walks by Moonlight works. Its soul soars fresh and free outside the self-seriousness and pity party of 20th century rock’s last gasp. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

OPIA

7

I Welcome Thee, Eternal Sleep HAMMERHEART

A loving gaze into a coffin

Apart from being a popular suffix, opia is also a description of the intense, ambiguous emotion some people experience from prolonged eye contact. This feeling of raw intimacy and cerebral depth is at the soul of gothic doom. The genre is a refuge for bleeding hearts and confessional poets who find strength in vulnerability. With members in Spain and the U.K., newcomers Opia embody those principles with their debut album I Welcome Thee, Eternal Sleep.

After an obligatory instrumental track, the album unfolds with unrushed purpose. “On Death’s Door Part I” introduces Tereza Rohelova’s impressive vocal range with bright flourishes from keyboardist Jorge Afonso Rodríguez.

The malignant, bone-dry rasp Rohelova uses between clean-sung passages imbues the song with primal anger and sharpens the band’s edge.

A song later, Richard Rees’ bass foreshadows the sorrowful melody of “Man Proposes, God Disposes.” Abraham Fihema’s mix captures the band’s solemn mood with a balance of reverb and clarity that adds vastness to the album’s sound.

While the atmosphere is rich and haunted, the guitars do lack power and punch at the record’s heaviest moments.

But being heavier-than-thou isn’t Opia’s primary focus. This is a band that values variety and dichotomy, and they make that clear with the sway-along goth ballad “The Fade.” While that song’s uninspired riffs feel stagnant, the front third of “Silence” succeeds as a gentler offering that swings the spotlight onto Rohelova’s singing.

Opia confidently close with highlight “On Death’s Door Part II,” delivering an unexpected blast of cemetery-shredding black metal. While the shifts from Peaceville death/doom to alt-goth are occasionally clumsy, I Welcome Thee, Eternal Sleep is a potent and promising debut. —SEAN FRASIER

PLANNING FOR BURIAL

8

It’s Closeness, It’s Easy THE FLENSER

Henna or no? Henna indeed

I wonder what Thom Wasluck, the mastermind behind the long-running Planning for Burial

project, thinks of the TikTok-driven fetishization of shoegaze that we’ve seen over the past couple of years. The genre’s new wave, headlined by bands with unfortunate names like Glixen and Cold Gawd, leans hard into a cartoonishly exaggerated version of the shoegaze aesthetic— impossibly soft and delicate, but, at least theoretically, meant to be played at a loud volume.

It sometimes feels like more thought goes into these bands’ fussily styled press photos than their songwriting. Certainly, much more attention is paid to the acquisition of effects pedals.

Add to that a pervasive post-Y2K/post-taste subsumption of nü-metal influence, and it’s hard not to be jaded on anything operating under the “heavy shoegaze” banner.

Planning for Burial draw a lot on classic shoegaze, as well as slowcore, gloomy alt-rock, ambient music, post-black metal and, yes, even the occasional splash of Deftones-y nü-metal. But it couldn’t feel more out of step with the latest wave of shoegaze revivalism. Wasluck makes intensely introspective, personal music. To associate it with a wave (or even a single genre) would be to diminish it. He loves distorted guitars that emerge out of whispery, lo-fi sections, and he’s no stranger to a slow-build crescendo with a crashing denouement. Yet his use of those sounds never seems to serve an aesthetic that’s been foisted upon him by genre. Instead, he’s excavating hidden parts of his own psyche.

That’s the approach on It’s Closeness, It’s Easy, the first Planning for Burial full-length since 2017.

It’s an album about entering middle age, watching time bear down on yourself and the people you love. There’s real weight to that, something that can’t be approximated through the cynical use of reverb. Shoegaze is still in the mix here, but it’s just one path among many that Wasluck pursues. One of his major inspirations is Low— he covered “Murderer” in 2023—and the muted melancholy of their Double Negative album casts a shadow on It’s Closeness, It’s Easy. But Low never erupted into the black metal histrionics that pop up, however briefly, on opener “You Think” and album highlight “A Flowing Field of Green.”

Minimalism, like distortion, is a tool for Wasluck—not the entire toolbox. —BRAD SANDERS

TOWER

9

Let There Be Dark CRUZ DEL SUR

Dark you like a hurricane

The WWE wrestler Sheamus’ catchphrase is “banger after banger.” What this means, in short, is that he delivers killer and action-packed matches at every show. The same could apply to Tower’s deft and brilliant new album, Let There Be Dark.

This album is chock full of bangers, just like the

best of ’70s and ’80s rock and metal. This album hits endorphin gateways like Live at Budokan, Kill ’Em All or Melissa. I can’t believe I’m writing this in 2025, but there isn’t a single fucking boring moment on this album. If you want to know how the Scorpions Love at First Sting frazzled the brains of a bunch of middle school kids when “Rock You Like a Hurricane” broke big in the mid-’80s, give this a listen.

There is, of course, a reason it sounds so good: Tower are a capital-B Band. Far too often in music, the focus is on strong performers rather than a cohesive unit. But the best bands have always come from a collection of talents working for the greater whole (think Osbourne, Iommi, Butler and Ward). Even bands without such storied names reached Olympus when they worked collectively. Tower have the best of both: astonishing talent and a focus on cohesion. Sarabeth Linden is such a powerful vocalist that a good producer could fashion an album around her with lesser talent. But Linden’s bandmates equal her gifts, and all of them are focused on the goalposts.

Your reviewer could parse details of individual songs or performances, but that would betray what makes this album so killer. None of that is needed. This is a record you put on and

enjoy the same way you’d enjoy a fine cigar, one of those high-ABV Decibel festival beers, or your last meal before the electric chair. It puts Tower at the same level as fellow traditionalists Crypt Sermon. Every song is a banger, every riff is memorable and everything makes sense. They could have named this album Replay Me. End-ofyear lists, open your arms. —JUSTIN M. NORTON

YOUR SPIRIT DIES 7 My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest M N R K H E AV Y

Paging Mistress Juliya

The dream of 2006 is still alive in South Carolina, at least as far as metallic hardcore quintet Your Spirit Dies are concerned.

Every song on their debut album, My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest, hearkens back to the heyday of Jasta-hosted Headbangers Ball. More specifically, they embody the precise moment of transition between Myspace and Facebook as cutting-edge music promotion tools. In an ocean of Knocked Looses and Code Oranges, Your Spirit Dies’ earnest love letter to the Ozzfest second stage milieu is pleasant and refreshing, at least to my ears.

The band’s great strength is their ability to replicate the full spectrum of that genre’s various tropes and—this is the hard part!—arrange and deploy those tropes to maximum effect. I think Your Spirit Dies know their strengths as well. The second song, “Serpentine,” showcases the full breadth of tools at their disposal: two-step beats skip-and-slap under chuggy thrash riffs, Swedish by way of Orange County melodic arpeggios, midtempo grooves with dissonant guitar accents and, of course, heavier-than-hell climactic breakdowns.

Those skills hit even harder when the band deploys them more selectively, as they do on their most well-crafted song, “A Rose for Every Stone.”

However, Your Spirit Dies could have left some of the New Wave of American Metal’s greatest hits in the past. Clean, flat, wailing emo choruses sucked on Warped Tour, and they still suck now. Unfortunately, some of that saccharine pap sours the last part of this record, particularly “Unjust God.” My Gnawing Pains Will Never Rest won’t sway readers that hated this sort of music two decases ago. On the other hand, those privately aching for Trustkill Records’ imperial phase can join Your Spirit Dies in pleasant, pummeling nostalgia. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

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by

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

WHEN PELICAN

HAS YOUR BACK t

here it was in black and white. The news hit just the other day that South by Southwest was taking it in the shorts. Specifically, the music portion of their program. Which, by my lights, was dead right around the time they let new media/tech types in. Those vampires go to places where fresh blood flows, feast, and then wonder, after the host is dead, where all the cool went.

But this is not about that. This is about remembering when we’d been lucky enough to get to play SXSW back when people still went there for the music. And when I say “we,” I mean the now-defunct OXBOW. Sure, SXSW had its quirks— couldn’t play more than one venue, and woefully inadequate fees for playing that one venue—but these were easy to work with/around.

The fourth time we had played it, though, we were DONE. The bloom was off the rose, and we were just over the prospect that playing there had any real value for us. This worldview definitely had an effect on the mindset going in. If Not Giving a Fuck was a place, then 64 : JUNE 2025 : DECIBEL

it was definitely the place where we were.

Which is why it was so strange and curiously foreboding, the place we actually played the “last” time we played there. Spiros, the club, vibed for all the world like the coke-fueled discos where I used to bounce. An impression that was in no way altered by meeting the owner, who kept offering me drinks.

The breakdown is this: I’m 6’1”, 225 lbs. With a marked propensity for interpersonal violence. Getting me “drunk” is a fool’s errand. So, I rejected his offers. Especially before we play.

But the show starts, uneventfully enough. In past times, I’ve looked out into the audience and seen Thurston Moore, former UFC fighter John Matua, all kinds of unlikely folks. This time, though? Familiar and smiling faces—it was the guys from Pelican!

Same label, Hydra Head, and here we were. I winked at them and then proceeded to do what we do.

But even in March, the stage had gotten hot; and, as tradition would dictate, off came my trousers.

I knew we were in for what had started to smell like real trouble when I caught sight of a whole phalanx of bouncers moving down the sides to the stage. But we were no strangers to such events, and when the power was cut, we were prepared. Greg Davis absolutely refused to stop drumming. They also made the mistake of leaving the mic on with me in full foment.

When a break in the drumming hit, I noticed Davis surrounded by bouncers. Rushing to the backstage, standing between Davis and the bouncer the conversation went like this: “The owner says he’ll turn the power back on when you put your pants back on.”

“Hmmm… that’s not likely to be something that’s ever going to happen.”

“The police have been called.”

“Whatever.”

And then, looking out into an audience of screaming people, people angry at the messengers, I see the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life: one of the guys in Pelican hock a loogie into the face of the one bouncer there who was larger than me.

The bouncer I was standing face-to-face with was as transfixed as I was at this display of David vs. Goliath-like bravura. It would also be totally correct to say, at this point, all hell broke loose.

Loose, as in full scale riot.

With everyone fighting over my pantslessness I did what any sane person would do in that situation.

I jumped off the stage, walked through the crowd, said hello to King Coffey from the Butthole Surfers, who just happened to be there, and made my way out to the front of the club, where I found a cop.

“Hey, man…”

The cop turned around, looked at me in all my pantsless glory and said, “Yes?” “Can we take a picture together?”

“Sure!”

And we did. Later, after the drinking had actually commenced, I thought back to the day’s events and said to no one in particular, “I love those fucking guys in Pelican. I mean, who woulda thought…?”

I did, and I do. So, if you ever need extra muscle, know this, then: Pelican are who you call.

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