(written by Islander)
The Catalonian band Cerebral Curse made their first mark with a three-song promo of delirious death-doom released last year on the Rotted Life label. Wasting no time, they will follow that promo this year with a debut album titled Abominant Incarnations of Sepulchral Depths, to be co-released on November 13th by Rotted Life and Night Terrors, and today we’re premiering a song from the album called “Mangled Cranial Liquefaction“.
This debut album includes “only” three songs, but each one is a long-form work, much longer than the songs on the 2025 promo. Each of the first two — the title song and the track we’re now premiering — tops the 11-minute mark, and the third one, “Degradation Towards Corporeal Dissolution“, is more than 17 1/2 minutes long.
The press materials in circulation provide a good introduction to the experience of these three colossal songs:
Abominant Incarnations of Sepulchral Depths delivers three sprawling monoliths of crushing, claustrophobic heaviness, where time slows to a crawl beneath layers of tectonic riffs, cavernous vocals, and suffocating atmosphere.
Built on impossibly dense riffs, funereal pacing, and an unwavering commitment to oppressive weight, the album strips death-doom to its most primordial essence. There is no excess, only the relentless pull downward….
We should add that Cerebral Curse have an admirable facility for concocting song titles that evoke the experiences of their music, “Mangled Cranial Liquefaction” being a fine example of that.
Cerebral Curse commence their mangling process of cranial liquefaction with slow-motion riffing that dismally moans and miserably whines. Equally slow, the drums land like body blows and the bass gurgles from subterranean depths, while the words emerge through monstrous growls and strangled howls of equally abyssal origin. The music feels like a fatal illness inexorably eating its way through defenseless flesh while sledgehammer strikes make it impossible to stand.
But, as noted, this is a long song, and Cerebral Curse begin introducing changes. After that ghastly opening phase they increase their pacing, hammering more vigorously and causing that diseased riffing to generate a hungrily surging pulse that’s likely to get heads pumping. Feverishly squirming arpeggios add to the music’s increasingly ravenous and gruesomely ecstatic aspects, while smacking back-beats and rumbling double-bass enhance its muscle-moving effects.
The band continue shifting gears — slowing and crawling and oozing musical ichor again, but also jumping into gallops, letting loose maniacally quivering tremolo’d swarms, and providing welcome doses of chugging groove where the riffing pumps like pistons — though the vocals are endlessly foul, both gutting and regurgitating in their toxic effusions.
Yes it’s true: As advertised, the music is primitive, even primordial, and it’s crushing and claustrophobic. But this isn’t some mind-deadening crawl through endless tar, because Cerebral Curse are equally adept at putting a charge into listeners’ reptile brains, waking up those equally primordial organs that make us reflexively want to strut and stomp and work our necks.
Rotted Life will release the album on CD and vinyl LP editions, while Night Terrors will provide a cassette tape edition. For pre-orders, check the links below. And after the links you’ll find a stream of the record’s previously released title song.
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.rottedlife.com/
https://rottedlife.bandcamp.com/album/abominant-incarnations-of-sepulchral-depths-2
https://night-terrors-records.net/
CEREBRAL CURSE:
https://cerebralcurse.bandcamp.com/album/promo-25