AN NCS PREMIERE: DISEMBODIMENT — “STYGIAN OVERTURE”

(written by Islander)

WARNING: You are about to be stomped and gouged, bounced off the walls and lacerated, dragged into foul and choking cesspools and made witness to violent charnel-house abominations. Your pulse will pound, your head will move, your guts will churn. And you will smile broadly at every abuse to which you will be subjected!

These are our predictions for how addicts of foul and ferocious death metal will receive the song we’re now presenting from Spiral Crypts, the hotly anticipated debut album of Disembodiment from Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada, which will see release in July via Everlasting Spew Records.

For those of you who might not be familiar with Disembodiment, they first came together under the name Oath div. 666, but they then reinvented their musical and lyrical approach and took their current name to recognize the change. They revealed their new direction in a 2021 EP named Mutated Chaos (also released by Everlasting Spew and enthusiastically reviewed here at NCS).

That 14-minute first strike was an arresting preview of what these Canadian monsters were capable of doing, and the new album meets the high expectations which that EP established. As Everlasting Spew has announced, “the band is now ready to dig you deep into the worst and most gruesome slasher experience your deviated mind has ever experienced!”

As you’ll discover through the song “Stygian Overture“, those aren’t empty words. Deciphering the lyrics may be difficult, because they’re voiced in grotesque roars and hair-raising howls, but they express the opening of a mystical gate to a realm “where shadows writhe and crawl”, where “darkness reigns eternal”, and where we will journey through a “labyrinth of black corridors leading to the rotting feast”:

Descend into madness
Where cadavers pile to rest
Descent into madness
Dragged to the vortex

Disembodiment couple those words with their own horrifying death-and-doom musical labyrinth, a twisting and turning experience that’s both chaotically accelerated and morbidly crawling.

Deploying riffage tuned to the timbre of frothing sewage, they create ghastly churning sensations and thuggish blows, backed by gut-punching bass lines and vividly cavorting drum patterns that scamper, blast, and stagger.

Slowing the pace, the vibrating guitars also ooze misery and suppurating filth, and they whine in agony and writhe like fattened maggots while the reverberations of the bass loosen bowels and the drums cave in skulls.

The music also begins to sound gruesomely imperious, in company with meaty bass throbs and neck-cracking beats — a prelude to one last convulsion of mayhem.

In fewer words, this is a hell of a song. It masterfully pulls from familiar antecedents of gore-strewn death metal but sounds explosively alive, and provides a great preview to a hell of an album.

DISMBODIMENT is:
Carl – Bass/back vocals
Christian – Guitars/back vocals
Eric – Drums
Mathieu – Vocals

The album was mixed by Christian and mastered by Carlo Altobelli at Toxic Basement. The ghastly cover art is the work of Slimeweaver. All other artworks by draught__.

Everlasting Spew will release Spiral Crypts on July 11th on CD, MC, and Digital formats, and they plan to release a vinyl edition in late 2025. They recommend the album for fans of Incantation, Corpus Offal, Undergang, and Rottrevore.

PRE-ORDER:
[BUY PHYSICAL] https://bit.ly/4dd8jTj
[BUY DIGITAL] https://bit.ly/4jOCT8e

DISEMBODIMENT:
https://www.facebook.com/disembodimentdeath