AN NCS PREMIERE: PIECE — “DEMIGOD”

May 142025

(written by Islander)

The Berlin-base sludge band Piece made their recording advent with a self-titled EP in 2017 and then followed that with a 2018 split, a 2021 single, and their 2023 debut album Ancient Greed. Another split (with Arsen) came forward the following year, and now Piece are ready with their second full-length.

The new album is Rambler’s Axe, and it’s set for release by This Charming Man Records on September 5th. To help spread the word, today we’re premiering a very cool video for the album’s neck-wrecking first single, “Demigod“.

The video announces the song’s subject matter: an ancient (and arguably extraterrestrial) race with unusual features and apparently supernatural powers who ruled the African empire of Kitara and were worshiped as… demigods. The video both embraces the legend and provides gritty and gripping footage of the band’s performance of the song.

As for the song itself, it’s massive in every way — massively heavy, massively muscle-moving, massively infectious.

The song’s main riff creates a menacing and propulsive throb, a braying and groaning presence that, when coupled with the compulsive rhythmic punch of booming drums and gut-slugging bass, gets its hooks in a listener’s head very damned fast.

The drumming throughout the song sounds like a boulder-throwing avalanche that got its groove on. The bass is heavy and hard enough to rumble guts and fracture concrete. The vocals are raw and ragged, expelling the words in a gnarly, gnashing howl.

The riffing changes, dismally moaning and ominously heaving but always returning to that enormously body-moving main riff. As icing on this mountainous cake, the song also brings in a hallucinatory guitar solo that doubles up and spirals high — a fittingly unearthly accent for a song about ancient extraterrestrials.

And let’s underscore a previous point before leaving you to the song and video: This is an enormous neck-bender and so compulsively catchy that it’s guaranteed to be on a certain list about infectious songs that we pull together around here right after year-end. (Methinks the song will have special appeal to fans of Conan too.)