AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SOREWOUND — “ESPANTO”

Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET Add comments

Dec 022025

(written by Islander)

Like almost all genres of metal, sludge has evolved and branched in numerous directions since origins that saw hardcore bands slowing down and delving into doom. These days, calling a band’s music “sludge metal” is still useful in some measure, but still leaves a lot un-said because the musical variations within that broad genre have become so wide-ranging.

Which brings us to Sorewound, a Costa Rican band that seems bent on turning back the clock by a couple of decades. Their music, as represented in their debut EP Espanto, is by some current measures primitive and “stripped down,” ugly and corrosive, punk-influenced and capable of creating grisly harmonies that might be abysmal in one minute and feral the next — but always seem horrifying.

Here’s how Sorewound’s label, Cursed Monk Records, introduces the EP:

Espanto is a raw, distorted storm of 5 songs that sink listeners slowly into the most miserable depths only to pull them back into the surface with violent outbursts of fills and pumping bass work. The guitars focus on maxing distortion and crushing weight. The vocals cut through as rabid animals destroying their surroundings. Lyrics dwell into human despair, corrupt politics, stranded relationships and emptiness in the absence of connection.

With the EP’s opening song Sorewound defiantly plant their flag in the changing hell-scape they’ve made for listeners. “The Gorge (Where things come to die)” is a slow and dismal stomper, reliant on gut-punch drums and hopeless notes whose distortion caused them to reverberate like plague converted to sound. Raw and ravaged screams bring pain, as does the sizzling wail of a guitar, and they both give the music a more visceral layer of torment.

It feels like Sorewound are dragging us through a giant… wound… in which disease is festering. But then they start hammering harder, and the music slithers and slashes — still diseased, to be sure, but more demented.

When they slow again, vivid drum-fills burst open against the listener’s skull, and the bass abysmally growls. The music staggers forward, coated in grisly harmonies and spiked by hair-raising cries from a throat lined with grit. Dismal and disturbing again, but chillingly vicious too, and the song’s lurching groove might get your head lurching too.

From there Sorewound turn to “Miseria“. If anything it’s even more steeped in horror, led by a writhing riff that’s gnarly and blood-congealing — still backed by skull-smacking beats and a bludgeoning bass. The grooves methodically pound; the grime-encrusted guitars morbidly squirm and miserably blare; the vocals fanatically scream.

But near the end, Sorewound start chugging, like the pumping pistons of a hell-bound train, and the drums surge into a cantering gallop, with the vocals reaching a new zenith of maniacal intensity. Even more so than before on the EP, this song’s final phase shows another side of Sorewound — punkier and more feral.

Next comes the EP’s shortest track, “Spitefuck (Te detesto)“. It’s a spoken-word piece (a sample of a speaking woman and her conversation with another), at first accompanied only by tribal beats and a dimly moaning bass. With a frightening scream as warning, Sorewound animate the beats and begin oozing out another of their grimy and macabre harmonies.

With that chilling interlude behind them, the band finish with “Relicarios” and “Vomitous Trypsteria“. The former feels like a slowly worming progression through pestilential ooze — until it flares, still pestilential but with bounce-off-the-wall rhythms and intervening episodes of exsanguinating riffage and freakishly wailing fretwork that channels despair.

The latter song, on the other hand, is a slow build that’s spectral at first (unlike anything else on the EP). Spoken words echo through eerie vibrations and dismally moaning chords, though the rhythm section eventually show up to get heads moving and legs bouncing. The riffing eventually does the same, adding fuel to the diseased melody and causing it to sizzle and more maniacally squirm around punk beats and ax-like hacks.

Perhaps needless to say at this point, the vocals in both songs are explosively unhinged.

And with that wordy review behind us, we’ll now leave you to the un-tender ministrations of Espanto in full: