(Though we’ve turned the corner into 2025, DGR has a couple more records from 2024 he wants to recommend, through the reviews below.)
Ah, it’s the most wonderful time of a website’s year. That brief breather where we get to both get started on stuff coming out in 2025 and kick ourselves in the shins over stuff we missed over the course of the previous year – usually in about equal measure.
It is imagined then, that I shall not be the only one with a few demons still resting on my shoulders that I felt compelled to acknowledge before fully launching myself into the inevitable shitshow that will be the new year. This time around, I’ve managed to dig up two more – one which saw very late release at the end of the year and another that I am in awe I did not come across during my many bandcamp and youtube music rabbit hole tumbles.
So, I shall attempt at the very least to see that they get some sort of spotlight here lest the guilt overwhelm me to the point where I become locked in a paralysis unknown to man up to this time.
Frontierer – The Skull Burned Wearing Hell Like A Left Vest As The Night Wept
Frontierer are a band seemingly determined to raze any approachable ground that lies before them as they grow more sonically violent and extreme with each of their releases. Given that their current bar seems to have been set by their previous two albums Unloved and Oxidized it isn’t too difficult to imagine that this approach is starting to result in music that is as chaotic as it is ferocious – sometimes bleeding through into the sand pit that some of Frontierer‘s members were already playing in with their Sectioned project.
The loose amalgamation of genre-clusterfuck that is more commonly referred to as ‘mathcore’ has a few projects that are taking the same approach as Frontierer but none seem to be so determined to be as abrasive and violent about it, as shown by the group’s late December 2024 – seriously as in December 20th – EP and song title combination The Skull Burned Wearing Hell Like A Life Vest As The Night Wept.
The Skull Burned… represents fifteen minutes of music from the band, ending a three-year gap since the release of their 2021 Oxidized, and although it is only four songs long, there’s enough music packed into those four particular tracks that you could treat it as if it were an album of its own.
The Skull Burned… is absolutely relentless in its approach, which is a path that Frontierer had hinted they might be walking down with their previous album, but all things considered, this is not a gentle descent into a newer approach; this EP is the equal of going nuclear from the word ‘Hello’. Frontierer have named the whole EP after the sequence of song titles within, so it’s not too unimaginable that the future for this creation is going to be the whole thing being dropped live in one go and without a breather in between.
The simple experience of taking this thing on with all of its jagged angles, sharp turns, chaotic twists, and sudden neck-snapping breakdowns is enough to leave one overwhelmed halfway through the intensity of “Wearing Hell”; one can hardly imagine how it is going to feel like walking away from the car crash of “As The Night Wept” live, as it shifts between constant destruction and unnerving silence.
The moments of calm built into The Skull Burned… are false reprieves because with a band like Frontierer, the spectre of oncoming annihilation is ever-present. Even if the band have built in some moments to breathe throughout the EP, the material that follows is constructed from crashing instrumentation and guitar-work contorted into static and noise.
There are a lot of bands out there for whom the drummer is the most important thing in the group, given that 90% of the punch seems to come from the percussive nature of their songwriting, but with Frontierer the drums are weaponized instead, no less explosive than the guitars that seem to be screaming or the oppressive layer of electronic noise that hovers just above the entire proceedings.
The Skull Burned Wearing Hell Like A Life Vest As The Night Wept is both a release that should not be taken lightly and also one that should not be missed. This is music written to tear your head off from moment one, and as strange as it sounds, it’s a breath of fresh air in that regard. Frontierer seem to be at a point artistically where the idea of approachability causes them to have a hearty laugh and instead they’ve chosen to amplify their punchier and downbeat focused madness into something much more maddening and intense.
This is an EP made of pure energetic release in any way Frontierer could find the ability to do so. You owe it to yourself to give The Skull Burned Wearing Hell Like A Life Vest As The Night Wept a shot if you’re looking for that one final conflagration to send the end of the year off with, or the aforementioned ground-burning to start the year anew with.
Sacramento – Four Nails
Since there’s effectively no limits on an article like this and it is basically our last chance to really dig deep on releases that came out in the previous year, this would be as good a time as any to cover Spain’s Sacramento and their release Four Nails.
Sacramento did one of my favorite things when it comes to covering albums, which is catch me completely off-guard while I was digging into other music. The crustier upfront brutality of the group proved to be a pleasant surprise – right about the time I was putting my finishing touches on the year-end list for 2024 – so much so that it felt necessary to give them at least some sort of shout-out before fully looking forward into 2025.
Four Nails is the sort of release that had it been stumbled upon earlier in the year during one of my many rabbit hole tumbles, it would’ve likely made it into that previously mentioned year-end party because it does exactly what I want from a death and grind hybrid, which is basically beat the listener over the head with an aluminum bat with such force that by the end nothing is left but a smooth paste.
Sacramento know exactly what they’re doing with their sound and it’s safe to say that there is no wheel being reinvented here. Four Nails is instead an album of singular mind and purpose that could have the band laying in the dirt with your favorite coffin dwellers just as well as your favorite righteously-charged grindcore group.
The amorphous line in between the genres that Sacramento straddle on their Four Nails can have a smorgasbord of different names and isn’t easy to pin down if you’re the type to want to scientifically specify each specific subsegment, but the chainsaw guitar and throat-rending vocals are easily identifiable as shorthand for a fury so hot that it glows almost iridescent. “Reborn” may lull you into a false sense of ‘deathened’ security with its apocalyptic nature but “The Taste Of Hell” could just as easily be in a genre knife fight with groups like Teethgrinder, Theories, and Retaliate-era Misery Index.
Four Nails hops around like a grasshopper on speed between its death metal forebears and its grindcore-heavy cousins and the wall of reverb and chunky bass guitar that the band soak themselves in like a ham in gravy earns them plenty of credibility on the crustier side of things. Songs tend to dance back and forth on their genre lines and you can sort of eyeball-prescribe which ones will be the shredded guitar and shredded lungs death metal tracks by song length – it should be mentioned here that “The Raven” does a fucking fantastic job at melding Sacramento‘s entire sound together – and which will be the semi-blast-fueled grindcore strip-miners of the release.
Safe to say then, that a song like “Despair” at just a ball-hair over two minutes is probably the most ‘knives out’ that Sacramento get on Four Nails, yet most of the disc always feels like you’re on the edge of having said knives drawn on you at any particular moment. There’s intensity that is upfront and extremely dangerous and then there’s the sort of subtle tension that seems to wait to explode. With Sacramento the band are already teeth-bared and ready to take a hunk out of someone’s shoulder; Four Nails instead is a ten-song procession of waiting to see which exact song is going to be the one in which the band did so.
So yes, if it seems like this bit of the review is both self-flagellation and a nature-defying attempt to wrap one’s leg around their back to kick themselves in the head, then you would be correct. Four Nails is a release that fills in the ever-growing maw for people who like their music skin-shearingly mean. This is the type of music that seems to exist for as long as the material it is built with is able to hold flame, because it is going to burn until the very last second.
Often, that means this’ll be built upon a foundation of explosive flash-paper like something a magician would use, but even that brief moment of energy is so blindingly bright that the smoke from it seems to linger in your memory long after it has dissappeared. It sears itself into your eyeballs and memory and that’s what Sacramento are doing on Four Nails.
Completely determined in its purpose and singularly-focused on destruction, Four Nails may be one that we missed in 2024, but one that is worth biting into now before the new year’s avalanche buries us all.