(written by Islander)
Impurist are a new death metal band formed in Hull, England in 2023. Their lineup features former and current members of Extreme Noise Terror, Gorerotted, Winterfylleth, and Introrectalgestation. They proudly proclaim that they have taken influence from the bands they grew up listening to, and they obviously must have grown up listening to violent horrors.
Impurist made their recording debut in April of last year with an EP aptly named Punishment Without Mercy. Since then they’ve recorded a second EP entitled Evolving Cortex. It will be released by 783label on CD, cassette tape, and 12″ vinyl — and the vinyl edition will include the band’s debut EP as the B-side.
The new EP, Evolving Cortex, includes three songs, and we have some thoughts about each of them — along with the premiere of a frightening animated lyric video for the title song.
The new EP begins with “Bubonic Ecstasy,” which sounds very much like what its title portends — like plague running wild. Introduced by nightmarish ambient sounds and horrid roars, it discharges electrifying bursts of hyper-speed drumming, dense waves of mauling, corrosive riffage, and bestially malignant snarls.
But Impurist keep listeners on their toes, injecting catastrophic hammer blows, poisonously slithering and viciously slashing chords, gruesome growls, strangled screeches, and utterly berserk screams.
Through it all, the speed and variability of the snare-work continues seizing attention, and frantically swirling guitar-leads add to the song’s dominating sense of madness, mayhem, and murder. And for good measure, the feverishly vicious closing riff will get your neck moving too.
That first song makes a startling impression and will give you a strong jolt of adrenaline. Impurist follow it with the EP’s title song, which we’re premiering today. It tells the tale of a student of the occult who succeeds in opening the world to monsters, with hideous results.
In this song, Impurist initially slow the pace and crush the mood, lead-weighted in its stomping heaviness and with riffing that seems to moan in agony and squeal in pain.
That woeful opening makes for a disconcerting break in the EP’s action, but have no fear: Soon enough Impurist start rampaging again, with drums hammering and rumbling, the filth-encrusted riffing swarming, the monstrous vocals rapidly roaring the horror-words. The song also inflicts swift battering-ram jolts, multiple percussive blizzards, and the kind of vile, sizzling fretwork that conjures the ravenous feeding of huge carnivorous insects.
The pacing relentlessly slows and accelerates; the music channels both horrid hostility and awful misery, and the guitar peals like a fractured bell of terrible grandeur; the vocals scream again, deranged and possessed. The drumming is again lights-out, and the bassist goes very fast too.
What that leaves is the new EP’s closer, “Teeth And Limbs“. It immediately stays in rampaging mode, as horrific and violent as the most enraged and deranged parts of the first two songs, but it also displays the dynamism evident in those preceding songs, swiftly switching the rhythms and bringing in brutish thudding breaks, deliriously soaring swarms, and gruesome crawls through musical cesspools of suppuration.
At the end, the music clangs like the final bells of doom, and terrorized voices scream in the face of their impending extinction.
MORE INFO
IMPURIST are:
Drums – JR
Bass – PL
Vocals – BM
Guitars – MW
TRACK LIST:
1) Bubonic Ecstasy
2) Evolving Cortex
3) Teeth And Limbs
4) Punishment Without Mercy*
5) In Gristle And Sinew*
6) Prelude To Pestilence*
7) Pestilent Plains*
*Vinyl version only
Evolving Cortex was recorded by Collis at Gorilla Studios in Hull, and it was mixed and mastered by Shaun “Chaotic” Black at DigitalDemonForge. Cover art, layout, and design are credited to Josh Brown at AN_Aesthetic, and the band’s logo and sigil are the work of @wibusuckartworklogo.
783label will release Evolving Cortex on February 28th in the formats noted above; the vinyl edition, which includes the first EP, is limited to 300 copies worldwide and includes a pull-out lyric sheet. The label is also offering longsleeves, metal pins, and patches, and merchandise bundles.
PRE-ORDER:
https://linktr.ee/783.label
https://impurist1.bandcamp.com/album/evolving-cortex
IMPURIST:
https://www.facebook.com/impurist1/
https://www.instagram.com/impurist_
783 LABEL:
https://www.783label.com/
https://www.facebook.com/783label
https://www.instagram.com/783label