Five For Friday: Death Metal 2024

Greetings, Decibel readers!

At this point, every year is a good year for death metal. There’s so much of it coming out every month, across every permutation, that fans of this music have everything they could ask for in terms of musical quantity. But that does, of course, introduce questions of quality. The sheer amount of new releases can be overwhelming, and standing out has become more and more difficult. After all, this is a style of music that was largely shaped between 1987 and 1993, with different offshoots blossoming not long after. In addition, we’re already about 10 years into the timeline of “old-school death metal’s” massive resurgence in the underground, meaning that bands face a real challenge to not get lost in the mire of colorfully gory album art, HM-2 clone pedals, and ever more lyrics about dying horribly.

I’d like to think the albums below stand out brilliantly. And yes, I’m sure you can name more. But just as a reminder, this column is called Five For Friday, not Five Hundred Things to Make Everyone Happy.

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Defeated Sanity – Chronicles of Lunacy

If you like your death metal on the brutal side, but with lots of hooks and dynamics that keep things interesting, Defeated Sanity are your spiritual heroes. As I said in my regular column covering the album, Chronicles of Lunacy sees the band return to what worked so well on albums like Psalms of the Moribund and Chapters of Repugnance. For sure, The Sanguinary Impetus was a very impressive display of musicianship and death-metal experimentation, but even the band has admitted that the concept of a “song” got a little lost there. They definitely still present plenty of technical flair here, but it’s employed in a very specific way. I mean, just listen to “Accelerating The Rot” right now and enjoy it.

Stream: Apple Music

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Ripped to Shreds – Sanshi

When it comes to straightforward death metal released in 2024, something about Ripped to Shreds’s latest just stood out to me. Andrew Lee and his compatriots just know how to blend Dismember, Bolt Thrower, Asphyx, and Grave into their own secret sauce that allows them to carry on the traditions of those bands without simply Xeroxing them and hoping no one notices. I think the key to doing this well is to be a great composer, and songs like “殭​屍​復​活 (Horrendous Corpse Resurrection)” show that Andrew knows exactly what he’s doing.

Stream: Apple Music

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Spectral Voice – Sparagmos

It had been awhile since we’d heard a full-length from Spectral Voice, Eroded Corridors of Unbeing having come out all the way back in 2017. It seems in the ensuing years, they transcended themselves into the peripheral, heightening the funeral-doom elements of their sound, while still pulling together various threads that make it their own. It’s a devastating, captivating, and entrancing blend of noise, one that resides in familiar stylistic territory while still being unpredictable. There’s a lot of bands that play various forms of death-doom today, and a lot of them are painfully boring. Spectral Voice is never boring. Two songs here run for longer than 12 minutes. Every minute was totally worth it.

Stream: Apple Music

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Tzompantli – Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force

Absolutely crushing death-doom, infused with the spirits of the ancient past. The band revels in its heritage, not as a sanitized, safe product meant for suburban department stores, but as an unapologetic expression of merciless brutality. Everything comes together perfectly on this album, the the guitar tones, to the vocals, to the artwork, and of course the lyrics: “Beat! Beating the drums of ancestral force, Dragged into the caves, Cut out their hearts, Under dark waters.”

Stream: Apple Music

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Witch Vomit – Funeral Sanctum

As the multitude of “new old-school death metal” bands continues to proliferate, one band consistently stands out from the swarm: Witch Vomit. I had the pleasure of seeing the band at the inaugural Austin Death Fest back in May, and their performance, especially when playing material from this album, was a definite standout. The album takes the stylistic foundation they formed on the previous two albums and begins to add black-metal structural elements that make everything even more dramatic and impactful. Check out “Decaying Angelic Flesh” to become instantly converted.

Stream: Apple Music