(written by Islander)
Almost exactly five years ago we published an extensive interview by our Comrade Aleks of Québec musician Yves Allaire, aka evillair. The focus was on his band Nordicwinter, although the interview ranged beyond that as well. As the interview exposed, Allaire has been making metal music in a variety of different traditions since the early ’90s (Metal-Archives lists 10 current or former bands on his resume), but the atmospheric/depressive black metal of Nordicwinter clearly became his focus. Indeed, Nordicwinter has released five more albums since the time of that interview, including 2025’s Solitude.
Which makes the debut EP we’re now about to premiere from a new evillair entity quite a nasty surprise.
The name chosen for this new project — Mortopsy — points the way toward the EP’s music, as does the EP’s name: Putrefactive States of the Human Form. It is, in short, a formulation of pathological deathgrind and death metal inspired by the grisly early musical psychoses of Carcass and General Surgery, and it’s great.
Mortopsy welcome you to their ghastly musical mortuary with “Colonization of the Post-Vital Substrate”, a vicious and viscous cavalcade of brutally hacking and maliciously churning riffage, maniacal percussive assaults, and fanatical gutturals that flare into rabid howls.
However, a lead guitar pierces through all those ruthlessly distorted and bestially malignant sounds to deliver an eerily swirling and wailing melody that seizes attention, followed by an ominously grumbling bass solo, a dose of demented fretwork that ecstatically darts and blurts, and a final convulsion that sounds like a junkyard compactor crushing cars into small cubes.
That opener provides hideously exhilarating proof that Mortopsy put some thought into its songwriting, creating a multi-faceted and dynamic formulation of musical depravity, and the next four songs pile on the proof.
“Putrefactive Anatomical Failure” is a high-speed and highly destructive mauling of corrosive tremolo’d fretwork, decapitating and knee-capping percussion, and lethal vocal insanity, but again Mortopsy infiltrate the song with a wraith-like melody, this time a slowly oozing and miserably morbid offering. The song also gruesomely lurches and maliciously swarms; there’s another quick bass solo; and it includes the screams of a torture victim – because what else would you expect?
By now you’ll also have discovered that Mortopsy punch up the songs with brutally slugging and savagely gouging grooves, and “Congenital Anatomical Aberrations” vividly reinforces that tendency, almost gleefully coring listeners in between eviscerating fretwork frenzies and arpeggios that manically dart and squirm. That song also devolves into a horrid and hopeless slog.
“The Gaseous Distention of Septic Origins” and “Necrotic Physiological Rupture” are likewise multi-faceted episodes of ghoulishness, with the former including perhaps the EP’s most headbangable chugs (in addition to inflicting nauseating, feeding-frenzy churns and fluid-oozing crawls), and the latter abruptly switching up the tempos (as all the songs do), manifesting both rampant high-speed psychosis backed by pulse-throbbing drumwork as well as brazen dual-guitar interplay and black-hearted bonesaw work.
As an homage to classic goregrind and death metal brutality of days long gone by, the EP is a triumph, a gutting and bone-splintering discharge of madness and the macabre that’s well-constructed, well-produced, and viscerally compelling. It might make you wonder whether there’s anything evillair can’t do if he puts his mind to it.
And with that, we’ll leave you the EP stream on two different players:
CREDITS:
evillair: All music, Vocals
Chris Undirheimar: Backing Vocals
Putrefactive States of the Human Form features logo, art, and layout by Dirgevows Studios. It will be released later today on jewel-case CD and digital formats (with a shirt on offer as well) by Black Plague Records, Pagan Fury Records, and Mortopsy. For more info and to pick up the EP, see the links below.
MORTOPSY:
https://mortopsy.bandcamp.com/album/putrefactive-states-of-the-human-form-ep
https://www.facebook.com/MortopsyBand
https://www.instagram.com/mortopsy_band/
https://linktr.ee/mortopsy
BLACK PLAGUE:
https://blackplaguestore.com/
PAGAN FURY:
https://www.barbaricfury.shop/