(Below we present our warren-dweller DGR’s review of the most recent release by the Dutch band Black Rabbit.)
Reminder for self at end of year when going backwards for year-end purposes: This is a review for a 2025 release.
I find myself musing on this constantly, if not just because it serves as a suitable cattle-prod to the brain to lure me from my “catch up on a whole year’s worth of sleep in two-weeks” stupor that the post-holiday season seems to have lulled me into. It is interesting that the first few releases of the year always find themselves entangled with a demented form of catch-up from the previous year.
Time being the non-infinite resource from a mortal standpoint, it has not allowed us to cover the myriad things we wish to write about. There will always be one more, one late discovery, and often we invent excuses to continue looking backwards because a signal cast off into space still exists in some form of radio wave. We quest to find it and ackowledge it, and so the tail end of one year hangs on like the most stubborn bastard out there, refusing to let us continue forward into the next series of unending car-crashes that we adoringly refer to as our favored musical genre.
We also, as a result, have compulsions and imagined debts that must be repaid and a mused-over line in a year-end list quickly becomes a one-way directive of something owed, whether a band is aware of it or not. Thus, it was promised that we would dive into Black Rabbit’s December-released EP Warren Of Necrosis and goddamnit here we are, only two months later – as opposed to say five or ten as our previous records have been – looking at the continuation of the death and thrash metal act’s conceptual universe, the follower EP to May 2025’s Chronolysis.
Photo Credit: Sven Scholten
The perpetual act of bus-chasing that we are in when it comes to the Netherlands-based crew of Black Rabbit means that it is just as likely you have missed our previous coverage of the technically inclined death and thrash hybrid, just as we have missed the day and date of a new release. So, to explain: Warren Of Necrosis is a continuation of Black Rabbit’s conceptual universe, resurrecting a title previously used for an early-in-their-career demo release but musically launching from the starting block right where last year’s Chronolysis closed events out.
The EP contains four more songs for a bit over twenty minutes’ worth of music, wildly experimental with the band’s sound and unafraid to take the ocassional jagged off-kilter path from what would otherwise be an excellent collection of mosh riffs. Completely divorced from Black Rabbit’s wider ideals of what their artistic approach should be, the group are nefariously good at the language of both the circle pit and the messier-mosh world. It is rare that the group groove just for the sake of slowing things down to groove; it is much like being ratcheted up to the top of a roller-coaster again just so Black Rabbit can record something akin to a maddening descent as the drums drive you into a well-trod and frenzied path. That they imagine themselves lightly-traveled storytellers is just icing on the cake for those of us willing to scratch a little bit deeper than just the surface.
Since Warren Of Necrosis boils down to a hot four songs it would be silly to dive super-hard into the EP, as many of you would probably still be in the depths of whatever blatherings surface in the mental muck attempting to describe it by the time the actual EP wraps up. This is an experience we often preserve as a joy of grindcore album and EP listening.
Warren Of Necrosis being a jailbroken sibling of an earlier EP means that it does share a lot of similarities with its older brother. Chronolysis demonstrated a very polished and experimental form of Black Rabbit, one that still had its knack for circle-pit riffing and resuscitation of the dead by way of death metal stomp but also had sunk its teeth into angular approaches, so that Black Rabbit weren’t serving up one basic burger after another. Variety is the spice of life, even when you’ve got a formula so goddamned good that we’re willing to let a band slide on forty-minutes of hefty growls and riff-work every once in a while.
“Initium Finis” welcomes listeners with bent and broken arms back into the fray for a wholesome guitar-solo-heavy thrash party full of whammy abuse and occasional Slayer worship, whereas “Apprehension” may appear a longer song at first but is actually a hair faster and obtains a chunk of its length from a mysticism-summoning introduction. Galloping drums and thunderous rhythms are the order of the day with “Apprehension”. “Null and Void” leans more on the death metal pedals than its earlier in the EP tracklisting, finding Black Rabbit occupying similar ground to Polish death-and-thrash workhorses Vader.
If Black Rabbit wanted to, one could imagine that they’d be just as good doing the rotating “which side of their musical venn diagram are they going to lean on this time?” EP and album career just as well as they do. They’ve already got a musical combination full of bite on full display anyway.
Warren Of Necrosis – much like the weirdly hard to find Chronolysis – has the Dutch Black Rabbit crew firing on all cylinders. Their collective block of material up to this point is hard to shoot down; they’re criminally good at circle-pit riffing and just as good at a double-bass-roll gallop that could lead any moron into battle without thinking twice. You can’t avoid a neckache and heavy “bangover” listening to Black Rabbit.
They’ve found the subconcious groove that metal seems to continually swirl around and occasionally touch, and they’ve bit into it hard, yanking piece after piece out for themselves and turning them into music. They break out tons of staple riffs from the death metal and thrashier side of things but it’s a language well-spoken to so many of us, and that they combine it into new forms without people feeling as if they’re being pandered to is an olympic-worthy feat all on its own.
Black Rabbit continue to take no prisoners on this late-2025 release, and even with us banging the drum for it in year-end lists and even adding it to the Most-Infectious collection at one point, it never hurts to re-iterate that you owe it to yourself to give Black Rabbit a listen.
https://blackrabbitnl.bandcamp.com/
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https://www.instagram.com/officialblackrabbit/