(This is the second Part of what projects to be four record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear his slate in preparation for year-end lists to come.)
Part Two of this completely out of control yet still well-intentioned slate clearing comes to us as the result of yours truly realizing that a lot of his review collective consisted of some pretty overwhelming death metal albums.
On top of this, there’s still more but they’re being shuffled around as best I can because even then there were still one or two “surprise motherfucker!” late additions to the list that, in this case, served as good balance to the meteor impact albums that otherwise comprise this fucking monster of a collection. Knuckle dragging and neck snapping walk hand in hand among this collection, save for one surprisingly introspective battering in the middle, and it only clears the way for an even more steady pile of music to follow… and we haven’t even descended into the year end list depravity yet.
Send help.
Demiurgon – Miasmatic Deathless Chamber
Going by what we listen to on a regular basis, death metal fans may be one of the few groups you could convince that laying down in front of a steamroller and letting it run over you, back up, and do it all again, would be a fun way to spend an afternoon. Given the opportunity, we’d probably take it with bells ringing because we have a whole entire subgenre of death metal that seems to sound exactly like what that experience would be. Not steamroller parts, literally just whole songs that sound like churning gravel and immense heaviness.
Without fail, it seems, every year also sees a contribution to the genre from Italy – which has long proven itself to be a country of verdant fields when it comes to heavy metal and never one for half measures, subtlety be damned – and the latest addition to that reputation comes from the long running group Demiurgon and their new album Miasmatic Deathless Chamber. Released in late September, it’s seven songs and thirty-five minutes of full-bore and zero-pretense death metal, whose constant snare drum battering could leave someone flinching at the next backfiring car they hear by the time this release wraps up.
Miasmatic Deathless Chamber is an album of serpentine riffs and subhuman lows. The instrumentation in place here is both subversive and impressive, all hallmarks of the more brutal death and slam side of the genre, the riffwork being as overly complicated as it is only to then descend into depths of depravity so awe-inspiringly dumb that you can’t help but be impressed. The entire time – no matter which song – the rhythm section is driven by such earth-moving rumble that you wouldn’t be shocked to see the band bearing the name of a local mining equipment company on the side of their amplifiers.
You’d never guess given just how relentlessly brutal Demiurgon are that the lineup shares members with the theatrical symphonics of the group Darkend – for whom we’ve sung praises multiple times. The genre-whiplash between the two is stark. Demiurgon is heaviness incarnate on their third album with four of the seven songs here edging well into the five-minute range and two of the others that don’t crawl up damned close to that line.
Not only does it seem like the musical horizons expand endlessly as songs continue to barrel forward, but the one short song “Throne Of Derangement” packs so much into its three and a half minutes that it is near-blinding. At first pass the song almost feels like the band seeking to top their own musical displays of violence in “Flashforward To The End” while at the same time making closer “Apoptosi” seem like a meditative breather. None of that is true of course, but the perspective provided in that last three-song block is enough of an event to make Miasmatic Deathless Chamber worth a listen based on that display alone.
The one fault you could find with this album is that it settles into its overwhelmingly violent mood early on and sticks to it pretty rigidly. Demiurgon wrap their way around bent riffs and odd angles in their songs with the expertise of a practiced dancer, and as a listener it does take a bit to notice that because the absolute momentum with which Demigurgon are striking is stunning. Everything is awash in musical brutality here and beatings don’t step ever, morale doesn’t need to improve, nobody escapes.
The saving grace of course is that even Demiurgon recognize that so much of that can turn extremity into a pleasant and puffy cloud, so thirty-five and a half minutes becomes the perfect dose from them. You could never think to cut a song when breaking them out on their own and sometimes the endings strike so suddenly – such as how “Aspiring To Omnipotence” fades into the titular “Miasmatic Deathelss Chamber” – that you’d never guess it was the band’s way of saying “this particular seciton has served its purpose, on to the next!”
Death metal can be broken out into a billion fractalized subgenres by this point and it seems Demiurgon are doing a fantastic job of enveloping the whole branch that could fall unto the genus “brutal”. It’s not the fully stated goal of the band, but much like their fellow genre dwellers Devangelic – you might be noticing a naming theme for these bands here – every song winds up sounding like a sped-up recording of tectonic plate movements, or the resulting effect of a planet-killing asteroid strike. Buried firmly in the mire and muck of the bludgeoning regions of the death metal swamp, Miasmatic Deathless Chamber rises up as an otherworldly collosus summoned to lay waste to everything around it. Demiurgon have created excellent genre-faire that will please many of us death metal surface dwellers.
GodEater – Alvorecer
There is a statement to be made by using a photograph and block font for a group’s new release in the way Godeater do on their new EP Alvorecer. Metal, for a large part, exists in a world of fantasy, and death metal (and all of its -core offshoots) especially so. It’s the way we excuse the veritable fountains of gore and the vicissitudes of misanthropy that often comprise the lyrical front. Because it’s all fake, we say. It’s imagination run rampant, made purely for cathartic release, as our fantasy protagonists go on their various murder sprees or lyrically lash out against the varied situations we call life. The anger is released, we all settle down for a nice cup of coffee and wipe off the sweat from the guy who took a swan dive into a septic tank before running into the pit, and we move on with our day.
The artwork is often both fantastical and fantastic. Serious effort having been put into this absurd venture and played up for maximum effect. Vinyl records become an excuse for us to basically have a private art gallery at a certain point.
A photograph, simple and solid line block division, and basic block font, suggests something more about a release. It suggests the true terror that we all will have to face once we’re done with our artistic escapism. A photograph with its extra dimensions and scenery which can be found after traveling makes an honest statement: That this release will be Real. There will be no fantasy and there will be no cathartic release through overwhelming violence. There is nothing more horrifying than actual reality.
Sometimes these very things can signal a “maturation” in sound. It can also be a wider signal of change-ups behind the scenes, and that “maturation” could be a quest for new sounds – Godeater themselves saw a few lineup shifts since the release of 2022’s Vespera. At the very least, Godeater are taking a hell of a swing at it with Alvorecer.
Since the Glasgow-based crew’s inception, Godeater have at some point or another found their way onto my year-end list shenanigans. The group’s artistic maturity often relects the movement of a genre as a whole, each release a snapshot of the wider musical assault taking place as they found their own spot within the ranks from which to attack. Every time, I’ve walked away impressed, and to this day will often find myself spinning All Flesh Is Grass and Vespera when there is free time to actually pick something to listen to.
Godeater’s releases up to this point have been interesting for the band’s willing experimentation; they’ve made an art out of a desire to separate from the pack by tackling different sounds to amplify a dense core of tech-death and deathcore inspiration. Alvorecer still maintains that “core” segment of Godeater’s sound but the group continue to refine around the edges and add new elements wherever they can.
Sung vocals, for instance, have been used in sparse occasions before but Alvocerer’s first song “Leech” makes them especially prominent by force of sheer enthusiasm, as the group use a winding guitar riff like a rope-swing tied to a tree, moving back and forth between densely packed brutality and an unexpectedly straightforward sung chorus. Godeater taking a swing at the well-established formula of beefy verse and sung chorus wasn’t necessarily on the bingo card this year, but they keep things interesting by continually winding the song tighter and tighter during the main verses of the song. Godeater function as a barely in control semi-track barreling down a mountain during the verses of “Leech” and then swing for the fences with their chorus segment, the high vocals aiming for epic atmosphere more than beautifying the local scenery.
Perhaps as a reflection of their change in artistic direction, the more hammering and head-on collision style of deathcore that Godeater wove throughout their previous releases takes a bit of a backseat here. Instead they bring a newfound melodicism to the forefront with two songs in the middle of the EP – “Encased In Wax” and “The Enveloping Grey” – both utilizing a humongous wash of guitar, echoing throughout the valleys and off of the mountains around them. The music behind them marches forward with unyeiling precision as if on a final walk of its own, resigned to a desolate fate at the end of each song, but the two do play as if two branching results of the same experiment.
The vocal work falls comfortably back into a mid-range yell and high scream that throughout a block of “The Enveloping Grey” walks hand-in-hand with each cymbal strike. As the drums place one foot in front of the other, so to it seems will the vocals in the song. Godeater are not strangers to taking a percussive approach to that part of their songwriting though.
Surpsingly enough, though, there was a sort of bleak and mechanically precise nature to Godeater’s songwriting prior. Songs themselves would be densely packed and excessively heavy but delivered in such a way that the band felt warm, as if their taste for experimentation was providing some heat to the otherwise calculated apocalypse that any particular song was morphing into. Alvorecer feels like it actually has some proper “life” to it, but that comes with a big caveat — in that this life is cold, distant, and damaged-sounding. Perhaps as Godeater have worked a bit of post-metal songwriting into their latest evolution within their tech-death and deathcore hybrid, they’ve found themselves less focused on outward explosiveness and more on introspective collapse. It does amuse that among the gathered reviews in this feature so far, Godeater have the one song in their collective called “Reprieve”. None of the other bands here could even consider such a thing.
The now three-piece of Godeater have charted themselves an interesting path with Alvorecer. A period of inactivity for Godeater seems to have resulted in them refining a lot on their sound but electing not to do the obvious “forward progression” one might’ve expected. Alvorecer is almost like a side-step. Not quite frozen in time and less a snapshot of a whole modern death metal scene absorbed and reissued by way of Scotland that the band have proven to be excellent at in the past, but a sense of familiarity as they take a hard left and wander in different directions.
The core of Godeater is still there. You have plenty of moments of outright musical punchiness where the band couldn’t be more obvious with the “headbang here, stupid” sign unless they were beating you with it, but I find myself consistently drawn toward their newfound, seemingly echo-heavy, post rock element wherein they derive much of their melodic work on this EP. Many groups have made a sudden hard turn into a mid-tempo stomp and friendlier “mature” approach and have had it turn out “good” but otherwise falling flat; Godeater stretch at the boundaries of their genre a little harder than that, so while you don’t quite get a white-knuckle adrenaline rush and high-speed beating, you do get an intriguingly pensive and martially heavy take on the Godeater sound.
If you’ll allow one of our favorite old phrases around here, it will be that what Godeater do in their current Alvorecer form and what artistic inspirations it opens up for them next will be interesting to watch.
Blindfolded And Led To The Woods – The Hardest Part About Being God Is No One Believes Me
Or, the hardest part about recording nightmare music is that eventually someone is going to take a swing at describing the fucking thing.
It’s a fun bit of happenstance that Blindfolded And Led To The Woods’ newest album The Hardest Part About Being God Is No One Believes Me should have a cover art that is so red-and-black dominant, sharing a similar artistic mood as the UK group Mastiff and their new EP For All The Dead Dreams, because both bands are absolutely fantastic at taking any sense of positive mood and smothering it in the same way a pyroclastic flow will suffocate a city. No light escapes and everything is eventually rendered to ash by utter ferocity. The two groups find themselves artistic siblings separated by country and ocean then, because both have some of the most violently oppressive and hardcore-inflected releases that have hit this year. Both, it turns out, are also very good, though they eventually diverge and head in different directions.
The turnaround for Blindfolded And Led To The Woods’ newest album is impressive, as only two and a half years have passed since the group’s Rejecting Obliteration came out. There had been a bigger gap for the New Zealand avante-garde bound death metal crew in albums prior, representing a shift in both priority and sound for the band, though they’ve stuck pretty consistently to an every two or so years release schedule since 2021. The impressive part lies mostly in thinking how someone could have more in them after an album like Rejecting Obliteration, and then on top of that having the follow-up clock in at a minute longer. Either way between the band and me, it’s got to be getting pretty emotionally draining for one of us.
You can hear the early seeds of how Blindfolded And Led To The Woods sound nowadays on their albums, but Rejecting Obliteration and Nightmare Withdrawals were, for lack of better term, something special. The former was a full representation of a metamorphosis for the band, and the form that they took on that album is the form they continue to wear on their newest release. This time around though, they’re a little more concise with their approach, and more willing to take an angular path before veering sharply back onto a track of utter brutality than the absolute maelstrom that their previous release spent its time ruminating in.
The Hardest Part… bookends itself with two of its biggest songs, clocking in at eight and a half minutes and seven and a half minutes, respectively. In between the album varies wildly, but placing your two monoliths as if some sort of gigantic cenotaph to your musical graveyard is a hell of a choice. You’ve set up gigantic walls of music on both sides to get lost in before the songs in between unleash an absolute torrent of musical hell upon the listener. Opener “Arrows Of Golden Light” boils and seethes in between its bursts of activity and closer “Coalesce” goes on a journey from start to finish. Blindfolded And Led To The Woods lure you into a false sense of security by opening that song up calmly after you’ve spent the previous half-hour weathering a musical hurricane, only to then take you into one final battering and chaotic whirlwind.
Chaos is a word that frequently comes to mind for The Hardest Part…. Blindfolded And Led To The Woods have a heavy chaotic hardcore piece that embeds itself into every song, distributed among the heavier and more dissonant death metal moments wherein suffocation among a wall of sound is commonplace. It’s how you can have a tracklist that wildly swings from four and a half minute songs to the bulkier bookends to a few that are sub-three minutes – “Compulsion” and “Cafune” wrapping their hands around the neck of the wilder assault of “Red” – and even on to a brief grindcore hellbeast of a song in the gorgeously titled “Snow Angel”.
The Hardest Part About Being God Is That No One Believes Me is an assault from all angles. Blindfolded And Led To The Woods are now on a three-album arc of traversing some very dark places for inspiration and it definitely shows here. The way in which it could be considered unrelenting is different from many other death metal albums wherein the overwhelming sense of oppression comes from massive tempo acceleration or conventional launching of bricks out of a machine gun.
Blindfolded And Led To The Woods use everything at their disposal across The Hardest Part…, and at times the atmosphere on this album is so dense and opaque that it can feel like buring your face in the mud at the bottom of a lake and trying to describe its layout by feel with your tongue. The grroup’s more avante-garde nature still shines through many of the head-on beatings that are handed out in each song, and the sudden switches from grindcore to post-metal to dissonant death to utter chaos have it so that this an album that is constantly leaving your head spinning.
Is it an experience where you’ll feel good about yourself afterward? Nope. Is it one that you should listen to anyway for the sheer intensity of it? Absolutely. Just don’t go recommending it to people looking for a “good time”.
Unmerciful – Devouring Darkness
You’ve probably spotted through the absolutely chaotic order of dates presented by many of the albums covered in this current run of reviews that we’re playing a massive game of catch-up. Many of these discs were absorbed into the great content dragnet prior to two of the bigger trips that this site’s long-term writers took this year, and while they’ve been out for a long while now, it still felt proper to check in with them because rest assured we have been listening.
Things don’t just pop into existence on a quantum scale based on the relevency of a release schedule as we chase traffic. Sometimes, it is even that we’ve made reference to and posted about much of a group’s previous catalogue only to never cycle back around to the newest release that proves impetus enough, even for albums that hit durng the big release wall of the May-June timeframe this year. Kansas’ Unmerciful and their bulldozer of an album Devouring Darkness is the benefactor of both those reasons.
Part of it is that we haven’t been shy in checking in on this particular crew before, but also Devouring Darkness has been an album to go back to when we want to coast on pure brutality, even five-plus months post its release. You can’t help but think that as the year is closing out you’re doing the metal world a disservice by not at least putting something down about Devouring Darkness, because it is part of a really good brutal death metal wave that has served as an undercurrent for much of 2025.
When it comes to the absolutely crushing realm of death metal, Unmerciful are an act both well run and well set in their ways. They’ve made a career out of being a perpetual undercurrent in that sound. They effortlessly blend an old school and brutal approach with the more technically minded side of things that burst out of Kansas alongside groups like Origin. They even outright cover an Origin song in the middle of Devouring Darkness. It shouldn’t shock upon hearing anything Unmerciful have done that the groups have shared members a handful of times at this point.
Devouring Darkness is only the group’s fourth full-length in a twenty-plus-year career but that is largely due to extended periods of inactivity for the band. Right now, the group are keeping to a pretty steady frequency of a disc every four-to-five years, and listening to Devouring Darkness, you could be easily led to believe that the group had spent the whole five years between this release and its predecessor Wrath Encompassed writing this new album. Yes, Unmerciful stick to a lot of tried and true brutality and tropes on this album, but they also jam pack a whole hell of a lot into said album anyway. It may be close to forty minutes of music but goddamn if at times it doesn’t feel like you’ve weathered near double that by the time “Vengance Transcending” wraps up at the end of the album.
Devouring Darkness is basically all bludgeoners and fiery guitar riffs all the time, but there are still a handful that stand out incredibly strong among the mix anyway. Not to accuse the band of having a particular naming convention – save for the one cover song being three words, most of the rest consist of two – but it does result in some killer songs like “Voracious Lunacy” and “Unnatural Ferocity”, both at opposite ends of Devouring Darkness.
The titular “Devouring Darkness” song being the longest makes for plenty of room for the band to experiment just how much they can pack into one song. They then follow it up with two sub-three-minute tracks, including the aformentioned Origin cover. “The Reaping” is also a murderously good song close to the end of Devouring Darkness, which gives the group a hell of a three-pack to close the album out on, even as it seems like the album just basically isn’t… stopping. Unmerciful live up to their name in that sense; the music never ceases and you’re basically holding your face up to a flamethrower for thirty-eight minutes when Devouring Darkness finally closes the curtains and shuts off the lights.
Is it feasible to describe something like what Unmerciful have on offer as “mood music”? There’s no clear definition as to what sort of mood you need to be in for this, but it clearly has to be some sort of rabid misanthropy taking place. Unmerciful claim their space within the world of death metal pretty early on in the opening salvo of “Miracle In Fire” and then stick there, piling bodies atop the funeral pyre for the rest of the album. Devouring Darkness lives up to both its band’s name and the album’s namesake. Darkness is devoured by total musical immolation and the band remain as unmerciful as can be when it comes to any sort of reprieve, other than when the album fully stops.
Devouring Darkness is an impact-event level album, purpose-built to be as heavy as possible, and as city-rending as they could get it to be. Five years of music spent in the forge hits different when it seems like Unmerciful’s mission was to collapse the entire forge on top of you instead.