AN NCS PREMIERE: HETEROPSY — “MEMENTO MORI”

(written by Islander)

After four EPs and a split since their formation in 2020, the Japanese death metal band Heteropsy will make their full-length debut with Embalming, an album set for release on October 31st by Caligari Records. The music is described on behalf of the label as a “mix of old-school Swedish death, melancholic vibes, and soulful edge” — death metal first and foremost but (in Heteropsy‘s words) with “vague madness and sadness.”

Further clues to what lies within can be found in the band’s identification of their influences as “sometimes” Dismember, Autopsy, Rippikoulu, Switzerland’s Sadness, and Sweden’s Naglfar: “We mixed our favorite death metal sounds, simmered them, sharpened them, stripped them bare, and then converted them into SAMURAI SWORD.”

The influences are indeed decipherable in the music, but make no mistake, Heteropsy‘s music isn’t some kind of paint-by-numbers copy. Rather than displaying rote fealty to death metal from an old age, they’ve created songs that manage to surprise as well as crush and slaughter.

The first evidence of this was revealed through the first advance song from the album, “Pandemonium Alter“. We gushed about it here soon after its surfacing:

In many ways it does manifest as musical pandemonium, though it doesn’t begin with mayhem. Instead, it launches with weird, almost calliope-like notes, gruesome HM-2-powered distortion down below, rock-smashing drum-blows, and foul gutturals.

The music is caveman-brutal and plague-diseased, but turns out to include some surprising twists and turns ahead. The riffing begins to sound frenzied, the vocals explode in a frightening scream, and the song takes off in a rumbling gallop surrounded by swarms of flesh-eating riffage. One really nice surprise (which I’m now spoiling) occurs at the 2:20 mark, as a solo riff rises in glory, still otherworldly but jubilant.

And the solo isn’t just a big attention-grabber by itself, it also turns out to be a signal for the song’s most neck-wrecking episode – so get your damn neck loose! And while Heteropsy continue working listeners’ necks, they bring in other variations, both violent and glorious — including another arena-ready guitar solo, fantastic drum fills, and truly disgusting vocal expressions.

Today we have further evidence of Heteropsy‘s heterodox homage through our premiere of the album track “Memento Mori“, which proves to be a very different and more doom-venturing experience than the album’s first single above.

As the song’s name signifies (the Latin reminder that we must all die), it begins with a beautifully reverberating guitar-lament, an affecting expression of sorrow that’s immediately memorable. Heteropsy then layer in very heavy bass murmurs, sharply cracking snare strikes, and slowly uttered words that find an ugly intersection among gasping, gurgling, and growling.

They also make a narrow space for an adaptation of that beautifully ringing guitar melody — whose appealing lightness just makes the song’s crushing crash which follows it all the more startling. The low end inflicts pulverizing heaviness; the lead guitar miserably wails and quivers; the vocals growl with intense, roaring vehemence.

But again, Heteropsy keep their listeners off-balance with another quick bit of ethereal fretwork and then a massively heavy HM-2-fueled stomp, with the rhythm section slugging like a battering ram and the lead guitar both screaming and slowly oozing its agonies.

They wreck necks, howl at the moon, drip tears, crack skulls, stagger with titanic heaviness, and lace the experience with a vividly trilling lead guitar whose shrill feverishness ignites the drums into thundering violence and the riffing into an enormous upheaval. The song is replete with contrasts, and its finale delivers another one — an elegantly ringing arpeggio backed by humongously distorted feedback.

And so “Memento Mori” won’t leave you as it found you. It proves to be both heart-breaking and bone-breaking, capable of monstrous heaviness but also soulful fragility, and when the vocals rise in wretchedness the effect is spine tingling (and frightening). To return to the band’s own words, it is a fashioning of sadness and madness, and strangely stately even when it’s pulverizing. Listening to this song and the album’s first single back to back vividly demonstrates just how very good Heteropsy really are.

HETEROPSY:
Koki Fukushima (Vocals/Guitars)
Shigenori Tamura (Drums)
Kota Maruyama (Guitars)
Hiroki Sato (Bass)

Caligari Records will release Embalming on CD, cassette tape, and digital formats, and it’s available for pre-order now:

PRE-ORDER:
https://caligarirecords.bandcamp.com/album/embalming