It was nice to see ’80s metal chodes get some love in Stranger Things but boy did they sanitize it. Here’s what it was really like. Body odor. Acne. Hair spray. Emotionally disturbed kids carving pentagrams into their forearms. Cheap weed scored on elementary school playgrounds. Thrash. Fluorescent posters of demons and wizards and a kid who roamed around at night in an executioner’s mask. And splits with sick, fast metal. Those splits and collections were recorded onto cassettes and handed out to kids who carved pentagrams into their forearms and had fluorescent posters of demons and wizards in their house because they had absentee parents. Those splits also are probably worth a lot on Discogs.
Wise Blood‘s upcoming split Faster Than The Fucking Devil nails the real deal feel of the time when heshers spent so much time smoking in shopping malls that they fused with the furniture. This thrash buffet of baphometic brutality is the collective work of Midwest miscreants Wraith, Black Knife and Graveripper and Russia’s Unholy Night. While there’s no way these bands were around during metal’s Pleistocene era, at the very least, they binge-watched Jim Van Bebber’s My Sweet Satan and maybe even own a beat-up paperback copy of the Necronomicon.
“A lot has changed since Warfare Noise roared out of South America in 1986,” says label head Sean Frasier, who was not around in the ’80s but gets a pass because he releases good albums. “But I still love the camaraderie and punk ethos of split albums. When I was growing up as a dirt-poor metalhead when dial-up internet was grand spankin’ new, splits were an economical way to discover killer new bands. Faster Than the Fucking Devil joins three of the Midwest’s nastiest thrashers, as well as our friends across the world in Unholy Night. We hope people listen and hold on tight because these 11 tracks are blistering from the first to last note.”
Spin the entire split below and if you like it (you will), it’s available for pre-order.
