(We present DGR’s lively review of the 12th album by the Swedish death metal band Centinex, recently released by Black Lion Records.)
If the smoking rubble of the American public school system and, by some extent given how intertwined they are nowadays, Google A.I., are to be believed, then a famous playwright once wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit”. But, a curious idea arises in reading the quote as literally as possible, and a new quest alights as the result:
Is there wit to be found in something that exists solely for being brief? Are the attempted jokes and madcap hilarity of many-a-plug-and-play grind bands secretly the funniest things metal has to offer? Is there something of wit to be found in an album that has shown itself to be surprisingly and unexpectedly short? Is there wit to be found in that unexpectedly short romp in what might feasibly be some of the purposefully dumbest music put to record?
The Swede-death stomp, writ large, has been the proprietor of hundreds of markedly stupid circle pits, a lowbrow artistic effort of high reward in the unleashing of rotational energy, and the revivalism of the last decade of “old school death metal” has seen the dead walk anew; bands returning from long trips to farms upstate or groups who’ve been in the game for a while yet playing a different subgenre of metal’s increasingly fractalized musical tree declaring to the world “we can make that bullshit too!” and succeeding for the most part.
Few bands have been more consistent in this effort than that of Centinex, who’ve recently existed as the other side of a musicl death metal coin for bassist Martin Schulman. Demonical, the other project he is a part of, provides a very modernized take on death metal, heavy on the blastbeats, the galloping double bass, and the high bpms, vacillating between something close to Volturyon’s shenanigans and the riding hordes of Amon Amarth. Centinex, the longer running of the two and revitalized soon after Demonical’s summoning, is the much more old school death metal of the two.
Centinex’s stated purpose is to exist as a throwback. There’s no artistic quest being pursued here, this is music made for the sick and those who love the gloriously dumb stomp-drumming that became a throughline of Swede-death by way of Entombed and their initial graduating class. After a few lineup shifts, Centinex has even built itself a concrete foundation that hasn’t changed since the surprisingly catchy and straightforward Death In Pieces in 2020.
And that is where we find ourselves now at the short and wilfully stupid glory of 2025’s With Guts And Glory. Whether there is wit to be found within the walls here is another quest entirely. But the scope of the album is certainly appreciated, clocking in at under a half hour. With Guts And Glory is as hewed to the bone as could get and wastes little of the listener’s time at all.
We have a history of reviewing Centinex albums at this point – alongside Martin Schulman’s other projects – and so we’ve developed a decent paper trail of the band’s career up to this point. They’ve traveled through the many different villages of a revitalized death metal scene since their relaunch; they’ve been outright brutally stupid and gore-obsessed, to apocalyptic, to the more straightforward assault of today. One thing you could never fault the band for is any sense of pretense whatsoever, and it seems as if every one of our reviews for a Centinex disc has to open with qualifiers such as that.
Our main point of contention is that previously mentioned lacked of pretense; Centinex don’t care about nor aim to carve new ground in the death metal scene. They’re very good at what they do already and their desire has lain more in adding to the body pile than transforming the body pile into some art-nouveau movement. If you had to put on a blindfold and throw darts at a rating scale for Centinex you would commonly find them around the solid seven-to-eight territory. Mindblowing? No. Tremendous amount of fun to get into a bar fight to? Absolutely.
Second point is that Centinex albums have long been a summation of their parts; they are releases that are easily dissected and the parts broken out from one another as evidence of the band going on some sort of musical kick of their own and deciding to fold it into the wider Centinex universe. So it plays out – as if the cover art didn’t give it away – that With Guts And Glory isn’t so much a wholly original Centinex album as much as it is the aforementioned Entombed-influenced or a long lost cousin in the Motörhead discography.
There’s basically ten drum beats total – generalizing of course – across With Guts And Glory and all of them are certified classics. You’ll hear one rhythm kick in and know two things after five seconds: one will be exactly how the main guitar riff is going to go and the second will be exactly what to do during said part. For the most part, it’ll be headbanging along, as the easily digestible is also easily translatable, and we’re not going to shoot down any opportunity to nod our heads along like the morons we are. The other option will always be to run around like an idiot because With Guts And Glory sure does loan itself rather well to the idiots throwing themselves around the pit approach as well.
The brevity we discussed at length beforehand works in With Guts And Glory’s favor rather well, as no song sticks around long enough for a sense of boredom to creep in. We wouldn’t accuse Centinex of being surgical about it but more that the band are practiced in knowing when a song has run its course, and more often than not, that wisdom has resulted in punchy numbers that wrap things up right at the three-minute mark.
There is, in fact, glory to be found in that idea though, because it isn’t too long before Centinex are looping around again back to the first song of With Guts And Glory. You could pick out separate songs and have a good time in one of three basic forms, with either the stompy death metal number, the d-beat riff tour, or the more straightforward guitar chug. Not only is there a sense of daring to be stupid – as the term was once coined – but a full-on embrace of it, and since Centinex aren’t looking for subtlety when you have a song title like “Your Religion Dies Tonight” in the mix, you have a meal perfectly befitting the Neanderthal crowd among us.
We can ballet dance our way around With Guts And Glory until we are calcified remnants for another civilization to discover. At a certain point we’d probably get good enough to qualify for reality TV. With Guts And Glory is easily one of the most straight-shooting death metal albums out in a while. It is righteously dumb and purposefully so, written around a series of groove-heavy riffs and just high-tempo enough in its pacing to keep the blood moving. It’s a continuation of what Death In Pieces and their The Pestilence EP were heading towards and it’s not something we can’t act like we didn’t see coming. Centinex’s career has been largely iterative; they started from a rock-solid foundation and have rarely strayed from that path.
You’ll come to an album like With Guts And Glory because it is a release that does exactly what it says on the tin. It is fighting music dressed in death metal garb, meant mostly for chaotic alcohol swigging, headbanging, and various moshing escapades if you have the braincells left to do so. With Guts And Glory doesn’t push the genre forward so much as it bullies it to the side just to hog the spotlight for a bit and have a lot of fun doing so.
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