(Today we present DGR’s first review of 2026, a full-throttle rush through the full-throttle rush that is Carrion Vael’s new album, which was released two weeks ago by Unique Leader Records.)
The first few reviews of every year lately have felt like an exercise in madness, an attempt to conjure spirits out of thin air while dressed in the most ritualistic way possible. Me, seated with my skirt of bone and three-times-too-big mask in front of a fire and various runes and sigils that may or may not just be permutations on the Pepsi logo – we can’t all be as creative as The Infernal Sea with their logo or draw inversions of an Asmodeus sigil ala Gaerea – and you wait for the year to speak to you. Last year’s end-list was an exercise in scrying to see what the future holds and now we are waiting for the first spirit to reach across the void and grab us by the throat to compel us into 2026.
So far, in spite of all the varied exhortations and exultations, that has no happened yet to this writer. 2026 remains frustratingly silent and has instead gifted us chances to catch up with late-2025 releases that were absorbed into year-end festivities alongside the initial wave of those brave enough to be the vanguard of a new year. It is the amorphous and fungible time that has us attempting to neatly can one horror only to open up the next can of worms to be unleashed.
It’s similar to how decades never end culturally right when a year turns over; it’s more like there is a two-to-three year hangover period before one finally shuffles out the door and the next dumbass thing the kids repeat ad-nauseum can rule the roost. Eventually life becomes a series of checkpoints where you’re counting decades by being thankful one particular bit of bullshit is done with and you don’t have to hear about it anymore.
Photo credit: Danny Tilson
If 2026 will not ‘speak’ to me then, what tactic do we employ so that we may hear its voice? This is where things get interesting, because January in the world of metal can either be a spigot broken off the wall and flooding your yard, or completely dry. The years where releases have been a consistent flow are the ones that scare me – it just feels too easy. January is a time of wild discovery and a time to check in with bands that you know are your equivalent of comfort food. Sometimes you get a solid mix and your brain fractures in six different directions. It isn’t writers block, it’s more brain lacking bandwidth. Indiana’s tech-death act Carrion Vael fall firmly into the second group.
They are one of a fleet of high-speed, hair perpetually on fire, banshee shrieking, and lightly symphonic backed tech-death groups who have exploded out of the aether as the torch is passed from one generation to the next, to be contorted and bent into new and shiny forms. A stacking of influences and talent so high the halls of heaven might find its eventual height just a tad gauche, all done in a quest to mask impressive virtuosity in veiled metaphors of sickness and groove. Like a thousand books with their bindings torn out, thrown into the air, and then reassembled with the idea that every book must have four hundred pages regardless of context or where its original work hailed from.
Their obsession with murder and the atrocities commited by humanity upon other humans notwithstanding, Carrion Vael’s fifth album Slay Utterly finds the band starting with joyful abandon right where 2024’s Cannibals Anonymous left off, for another eight songs of head-spinning guitar-shred worship and lyrical violence in equal measure for forty-two minutes. Is it any wonder that opener “19(fucking)78” basically begins with a zero-to-one-fifty hellbound scream?
All credit to Carrion Vael: for five albums – with Slay Utterly included – they have proven they can do the thing. There exists a level of absolutely terrifying competence that bands have achieved these days that sounds as if they could play circles around anyone now, dwarfing your average riff-based guitar player into looking like they’re struggling to keep up with your usual ice cream truck staples.
At base level this is a style that is incredibly fun because your first five-to-ten listens are just constantly having your face blown off as each densely packed song plows its way across the way in front of you. That first group of listens is just as much wonderment, the wonder of how a band can keep a song hanging on by sheer force without it falling apart on the rails. Afterward, though, is where groups tend to falter, but a band like Carrion Vael have managed to make steady headway in the last ten years. They’ve figured out how to make all of these high-speed pyrotechnic shows sound ‘composed’, a loosely-bound chaos that does have some structure to it, even as they barrel their way through a collective of deathcore and metalcore staples that’ve been so firmly ensconced in this branch of the tech-death tree that they’re now inherent to the root of the matter.
Slay Utterly is the latest example of this shopping list checked off by shotgun songwriting approach. There’s plenty of influences to be had and tithed too; we recognized a lot of it on Cannibals Anonymous previously, but the group still likely won’t be escaping comparisons to The Black Dahlia Murder any time soon. Carrion Vael have recognized a gap in the musical world and are reaching across the void with spindly arms to drag us backward into it. They even break out an old trick Wretched used to pull in mixing in some flamenco and Mexican folk-inflected guitar work into one of their songs, to help scatter the plot a bit so that Slay Utterly isn’t a constantly overwhelming force emerging from your speakers – one containing all the dynamics of a glacier falling into the ocean.
Among the eight songs of Slay Utterly there are some absolutely gruesome ass-kickers. Carrion Vael’s current writing philosophy hinges upon ‘take previous album and amplify tenfold’, so even when the subject matter turns hair-raisingly violent, the music is bouncing around with the energy of a thousand suns. There’s only so many ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ versions one can work from until the whole album is built out of porcelain, but the varied vocal stylings of the band as they rotate through the occasional attempt at haunted clean singing, the ever-constant shifting of the guitar work, and the melodic backings on both shredded lead and light symphonics keep Slay Utterly plenty exciting.
You’ll have the semi-gist of the album’s emotions as a whole after you barrel through the opening madness of the aforementioned “19(fucking)78” and the wildly varied “Truth Or Consequences” after that, but there’s an equal amount of ambition that follows in the ten-minute pairing of “1912” and “30 on 9”. These are songs delivered with breathless abandon and swooping guitar leads that dive and soar to gain momentum again while still giving a nod to the cheap seats with some of the nastiest breakdown-work this side of the deathcore sphere; probably too fast for the true wall-punchers among us, but otherwise you’ll almost feel it coming from a mile off the same way your pets can sense an earthquake. That sudden drop and descent even when it seems as if Carrion Vael are steadfastly determined to ram this musical car off the side of a cliff.
The six-plus-minute movie soundtrack opening spilling into riff-avalanche that is “Lord of 74” signals that all bets are off musically for Carrion Vael for the last few songs of Slay Utterly. It makes a solid and commendable attempt to condense basically a whole album down into one song, fails mightily, and makes for one hell of an explosive event musically. There’s so much happening within that one song alone that you would have an easier time splitting each approach into three parts and taking it in two-minute chunks, just to create your own conspiracy chart of how the song continually folds in on itself and somehow lands on clean-sung chorus bits as its main glue.
Slay Utterly is an exciting and fun album even as you can recognize all of its gears turning and clicking into place to form its automata. It is also as reliable as a tech-death release in the modern age can get. It doesn’t fully aim for the excess of something like Obscura’s many offshoots have done in recent ages, but is a solid staple in the United States-centric take of flesh-boiling-fast tech-death. A light layer of melodic symphonic and keyboard work to amplify what the band are already doing is the most Carrion Vael give their way over to ridiculous artifice; instead this is a classic take on the endless waterfall of instrumentation world of death metal.
Breaking out specific songs can be hilarious because Slay Utterly taken as a whole is a completely different experience from going song-to-song. Sometimes you feel like a fool because you’ll be in the double-digit listens and still find yourself going ‘how did I miss this? Did I even listen to the same song?’. Taken as a whole Slay Utterly is a constant army of voices vying for your attention. Something explodes over here, something else is on fire over there… Slay Utterly has many of the glorious hallmarks of the current tech-death genre as a whole. It is a gratifying snapshot of an object moving at hyper-speed, much as the tech-death genre as a whole evolves and metamorphoses into new forms each year as everyone takes their wildest and most wanton swing at it so they don’t just devolve into the next collective of sharp logos and hammering drums.
Carrion Vael do a solid job of transposing all of their influences overtop a well-laid foundational blueprint and manage to steer the car just off the road enough that the resultant cacophony is something they can fully claim as their own.
https://uniqueleaderrecords.bandcamp.com/album/slay-utterly
https://www.instagram.com/carrionvael
https://www.facebook.com/CarrionVael