(This is the fourth and final Part of a series of record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are somewhat shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear the slate in preparation for his year-end lists that will be coming soon.)
This started with the intention of me absolutely smashing out four of these and then diving head-first with wanton abandon into my year-end list collective. A final freeing of thoughts so that I could then look backward through the year and fry my brain one more time while rediscovering all of the music I had enjoyed since the beginning of 2025.
Then your pet gets sick and you wind up being told that she has three or four different things happening all at once and you now have a twice daily, six rotating medications regimen to stick to and things get sort of waylaid until you’re back to wavering on the precipice of stability and you can weasel a little time out to write something. That’s where I’m at now, I think. I should probably check on the cat again just to be safe.
Today’s final collective is a wild one, a combination of releases that kept getting back-burnered, opening and closing paragraphs rewritten multiple times, and discoveries that happened while perusing different label Bandcamp pages while writing the previous three entries in this series. In combination with my year-end list – which I do already have basically laid out albums-wise, just not written – these things have started to congeal into one mass of ideas that I’m not sure apply to each album. In order to prevent random wires being crossed I’ve somewhat sequestered this article from the year-end shenanigans, and as such, must finish this before the true descent into madness begins.
Thy Disease – United We Fall
Poland’s Thy Disease is a name that will have some familiarity around here but only for those who’re truly ancient in the site’s lifespan. Thy Disease have been through multiple iterations and incarnations over a sizeable multi-decade career at this point, and while their core has always revolved around a chunkier death and groove metal hybrid, the outer layers are the most transformative, as the band have had an industrial and electronics-heavy influence interwoven in their sound.
Just how much for each particular set works its way into an album’s ratio of elements has differed across their career, but it was 2014’s Costumes Of Technocracy wherein we made our contact with the band. Costumes Of Technocracy was an electronics-heavy album that was almost invasive at times, but the combination of relenteless heaviness and over-the-top theatrics worked in Thy Disease’s favor. Costumes would also be the last album up to this point when vocalist Sebastian Syroczynski made an appearance.
Thy Disease went through some lineup shifting in the time since, and in 2019 would unleash the album Transhumanism, which leaned further on the Meshuggah-inspired riffwork than they initially had. While it was a pretty good collective of songs, it didn’t quite land with us over here and so, as memory serves, we never really followed up with it.
2025’s United We Fall heralds a return to the Costumes Of Technocracy lineup and a renewed effort on our part to keep in touch wth the band. We may not have been good about keeping up with them during the Transhumanism-era of the band but we can do our best to right some wrongs here, and what better place than to start with the aforementioned United We Fall, which was released at the tail end of November of this year?
The tale of the tape for United We Fall demonstrates a Thy Disease that have become very focused on one objective in the eleven years since the last time I took a good look at them. United We Fall weighs in at eleven songs splayed out across thirty-three minutes of music. Most of these stick to a neat three-to-four minute range, save for an indulgent opening at – gasp – nearly five minutes, which Thy Disease offset later on by unleashing a hellish “Summoning Of War”, which clocks in at two-minutes and forty-two seconds of blastbeat-driven fury before severing ties with this mortal coil.
Thy Disease have been an adventurous and consistent outlier among the wider Polish death metal scene, which has long been colored by the mathematical and overwhelming precision of groups like Decapitated and Dormant Ordeal or the bludgeoning and righteous death metal fury of bands like Hate and Behemoth before they became a spectacle unto themselves. Poland is a verdant ground for metal in general but that hefty and precise groove has been selectively bred as a throughline for the region as a whole. Thy Disease have been content to have a lot of that in their sound but also have had a ton of programmed electronics as well, which has resulted in them occupying a few different worlds at the same time; a fun and unholy hybrid of industrial and death metal befits a weird few such as yours truly.
United We Fall does away with a lot of that in favor of complete bludgeoning and ferocity, resulting in a more traditional but enjoyable heavy album from them. Thy Disease punctuate much of their heavy groove with monstrous death metal drumming, enough to make any fan happy. You’d be hard pressed to take a song like “From Above” and not imagine it crushing the life out of someone as it continually descends into an earth-shaking rumble during its post-chorus closing segments. On the other end you have the “We can do that bullshit too!” statement of “Victims Of Need”, which is less shot-across-the-bow and more shot directly at the captain’s chair when it comes to the death metal scene.
If it seemed like opener “Hellish Awakening” was building up to an immensely heavy thirty-minutes of music for Thy Disease, “Victims Of Need” is the follow-up blow to make sure said point is hammered past-home and into another layer of the Earth. I would even be willing to argue that songs like “Victims Of Need”, “Hollow Future”, and “The Arsonist” are worth the price of admission alone as those’re the three that on first pass really grabbed my attention for the “oh shit they’re on to something here” moment of United We Fall.
It’s only been a few weeks since the release of the album, and I’d be lying if I didn’t own up to the fact that Thy Disease have dominated a large chunk of my listening time. It’s not the most artistically wide-reaching album from them by any means, and much of the electronics and computer-tech jargon that defined earlier albums has been sidelined in favor of a back-to-basics skull-crushing death metal disc.
United We Fall is top-to-bottom violence in that sense because it’s Thy Disease fighting their way through a well-known battleground, but as a “back to basics” album for them, United We Fall is shockingly good. There’s a pure vein of relentless precision that Thy Disease have tapped into here, and for thirty-three fairly straightforward and singularly focused minutes, they’re more than likely to snap a few necks along the way. This is one of those late-in-the-year albums you can just tell is going to completely wreck your listening habits for the first part of the following year.
Demon King – Death Knell
I like to think that the universe exists at a sort of neutral equilibrium. For every good, there is bad, for every extremity on one side there will be an answer on the other. The universal pendulum will swing one way only to swing back just as hard in the other direction. Eventually we will settle at a neutral zero only for the next event to push things one way and pull them back the other. We’re never truly at rest but I do believe that we’re working our way there.
Granted, “rest” is probably the eventual heat death of the universe but who has time to think about nihilistic shit like that?
I think this applies to music as well. For the unfocused groups we also get focused bands; for the artistic groups we get those that’re basically “products” first and the music is happenstance; and for every doom band that insists on choking the everliving fuck out of the life of one single guitar riff for agonizing minutes at a time, we have groups like Demon King who insist on leaving nothing for the rest of the class. At this point it’s understandable at least how you can have a band get accused of plagiarizing another by the sheer virtue of there being “nothing left” when you have a group like Demon King around. In the center, who the hell knows, maybe we find ourselves at the altar of the four-chord million dollar songs befit for car commercials. But, that’s not Demon King’s Death Knell album. Not by one bit.
Every year has been a fruitful year for those of us who enjoy the hair on fire shrieking and high-speed ferocity of the modern tech-death scene. It’s a style long since codified, and we have now acheived close to critical mass with many groups who’re just so insanely talented that the genre as a whole could easily be broken down and parted out to thousands of other bands and it would be like putting in powerleveling video game characters.
It’s always amusing when a more popular band winds up recruiting some of the folks who’ve spent the early parts of their career in tech-death groups such as Demon King, because they always seem so impressed with what they can do; you almost want to point to the first three songs of any album that they appeared on initially and go “look at what they used to be required to do”. Demon King are part of that strain of tech-death band, and yes, they’re part of The Artisan Era’s collective of guitar wizards who fly across the fretboard with the agility of a stunt plane.
Death Knell has been a long time coming too, with the initial salvo of the band being launched all the way back in 2019 and some of our own coverage of them coinciding with the 2021 release of The Final Tyranny EP. From that initial single it took six years and some decent lineup shifts before we arrive to Demon King in their current from on Death Knell.
Death Knell opens strong with “Requiem For A Dead World” and then proceeds to basically stay planted there for the entirety of its hair-under-forty-six minutes worth of music. The eight songs on offer here are some of the weightiest on the tech-death ground, with not a single one giving a shit about coming in under five minutes and the two that sail over six – closers “Death Knell” and “To Trample And Destroy The Nations” – feeling especially indulgent.
The guitar-front alone on offer from Demon King is a special sort of insanity, taking up just as much of the spotlight as the vocal work or the impressive drum clinic taking place within each song. These are songs that are often built to propel from one guitar lead or solo to the next, and as you’re quickly accellerated through “Incineration Mantra” and “The Poisoned Veins Of The Willing” you can even lose track of the twists and turns the band have taken along the way.
Guitar solos and leads almost become the neutral-center from which the band move into their next attack. It’s why songs like “Saturnal Abyss, Carbonic Prison” can even maintain interest so late in an album, because Demon King are tearing their way through the musical topography so quickly that your brain is scoured clean by the end of each song, freshly reset for the next massive cavalcade of guitar solos and rhythm section destruction headed your way. At thirty-plus minutes into the album you almost get used to becoming a fresh canvas for the band to paint upon again.
The constantly shifting and moving parts of Death Knell are what helps keep this album interesting. It is a release that is perfectly built to stand shoulder to shoulder with a lot of the pillars in the genre and an album that joins a the hallowed class for 2025 tech-death crews. The seemingly endless font of inspiration that Demon King draw from for their guitar leads across this album quickly reaches hilarious excess rather quickly, reminding of Inferi’s brand of insanity wherein it felt as if the band were saying “oh you like this stuff? how about some more stuff piled on top of the stuff we’re adding now?”, until you have these ridiculously overstuffed songs that at four and a half minutes have more musicality in them some other albums do by the halfway point.
It’s not a knock against Demon King in any sense that they’ve achieved such a thing; more an acknowledgment of the idea that Demon King have packed these songs so full that even in the month-plus since release one still can’t feel fully confident that they’ve covered all the ground they want to with the band before writing about it. That’s only within forty-six minutes worth of music, even. Death Knell has a truckload of music on offer within its eight songs, and the many adventures that Demon King fling themselves on with reckless abandon within each song may be worth quartering up for on their own.
Newbreed – Outlaw
Our second dispatch from Poland comes courtesy of the band Newbreed and their newest album Outlaw. Discovered as part of a late-night binge that had me leaping in and out of various record label Bandcamp pages, this is an album that has fascinated me.
Part of that is due to how starkly different this prog-rock collective – that’s right folks, not metal – stand out in comparison to so much of what was passing through the ol’ ear canals and even in this particular grouping. They found themselves as something of a last-minute addition to my review archive in part because I felt that I needed some levity in the face of some extremely heavy albums that had all been condensed into one block for the last part of the year. Safe to say, perhaps jamming seven or eight albums of death metal so dense they could sink to the Earth’s core is not the brightest idea out there.
Newbreed’s take on progressive rock that has them drifting between the harsher tones of heavy metal – at times – and a lot of surprising ’90s grunge influence caught me on the back foot initially. Those first few exploratory takes didn’t have me listening to songs so much as wanting to see where Newbreed would take their Outlaw album next. Each song became its own mini-adventure.
But honestly, when you have the Selfmadegod label page throwing out enough descriptors and influences that the result starts to look like someone left a food processor on for too long, you can’t help but be curious about what is actually going to emerge. What do you do with a group whose “for fans of” list contains the names Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, King Crimson, Gojira, and Morbid Angel? Given the multitude of trips already made through Outlaw and the parsing of chaotic elements that Newbreed somehow manage to make work on their new album, it also wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that the band had managed to convince Alice In Chains‘ vocalist William Duvall to pop up in a few songs.
It has been about seven years for the Newbreed crew to release a proper sequel to their 2018 album Law. In that context the Outlaw title makes sense; the wide kaleidoscope of musical inspirations on the other hand make for a more intriguing experience. There’s over fifty minutes of music here and while the aforementioned list of influences starts to make sense the more you listen to it, it was surprising just how much of the ’90s grunge scene seems to have had an impact on Newbreed.
Well, that and it seems like the band are also of the same class as Pain of Salvation when it comes to song dynamics. Things appear strange at first and songs shifting from surprisingly heavy – see opener “Brotherhood” for instance – to calmer and more explorative within the same five minutes is an event to witness at first. It’s a suitably complex formula for the band, and while it seems the promised industrial elements don’t appear as often as one might expect, it may be more that Newbreed are covering their bases when it comes to the varied descriptions that could be applied to an album like Outlaw, because otherwise one wouldn’t know where to start.
That’s a sign of a good prog-rock record though, that there is some individuality being maintained and this isn’t just a wild grab-bag of things that have appealed to the band over the course of a musical upbringing. Songs throughout Outlaw have an opportunity to stand on their own, such that you could take a three-minute burner like “Sinusoida” early in the track listing and place it up against the wandering “I Promise To Be Free” two songs later and you’d have a task ahead of you explaining that it’s the same band, save for some chunky-as-hell guitar when they do decide to deliver on the “heavy” promise.
“Edging The Real Life” for instance is one of the heavier songs on Outlaw as a whole. The churning bass guitar that serves as the focal point for its introductory acrobatics gives way to the first suspicion that Newbreed vocalist Tomasz Wolonciej is channeling the aforementioned current Alice In Chains frontman. In an album of constant head-turning moments – enough that we’ll be walking away with a neck ache when this writeup is done – hearing that opening vocal line still managed to cause one to whip his head around hard enough that the audible crack was enough to have the neighbors check in on me. Still though, “Edging The Real Life” is a fantastic spotlight later on in the album, though it’s hard not to spend a whole review extoling the virtues of just listening to the entire thing.
Outlaw is one of the most unexpected late-year discoveries on this corner of the internet but it is one that is very appreciated. Selfmadegod have been a source of great discovery over the years, but even so, albums that are leagues heavier on the traditional metal weighing scale have been far more in their wheelhouse. Newbreed get to be the weird one in a batch of underground heathens to begin with, but with an album that covers such a wide expanse of musical directions that you can’t not be drawn into it.
Any time the band take on the guise of another group for about thirty seconds or metamorphose into a different band unto themselves on Outlaw makes for a musical moment that is difficult to deny. They chameleon drift through genres and inspirations in a way that is almost indescribable, and the art of blurring them all together is what makes Newbreed experts in their craft. They find individuality by managing to do what so few bands do when they mix so many different things together — they blend it all on their own and it doesn’t feel at any point like they’re just bolting and riveting things together to take one more shot at an algorithmic description.
Outlaw nears close to an hour but pulls off the magic trick that groups like The Ocean have been good at for years, because it just doesn’t feel like it. It is hypnotic and mezmerising in that way. As a bit of levity from the much heavier swath of music this collection has been buried in, Newbreed comes as a definite recommendation.
Cult Of Suffering – By Their Fruits
Cult Of Suffering’s By Their Fruits was an album that I’ve always meant to get around to chatting about over here ever since its June 1st release. I’ve recommended it to a handful of people at this point, but even half a year removed had yet to scribble full sentences about it on our corner of the internet. This is the one I’d say has probably faced the most opening paragraph rewrites as the year has gone on, each trip back to it resulting in some new “thing” that was interesting enough to talk about.
Hailing from Spokane, Washington, Cult Of Suffering have all the airs and classic ingredients of your forest-dwelling black metal band, but what was interesting about the group has been the fact that Cult Of Suffering feel like something that began as a solo project that slowly got out of control in terms of scope and scale over the course of working on an album. As a result, By Their Fruits tries a lot of things to help break it out of the stereotypical moss and mold of their region’s crowded music scene. It is in that willingness to try things – whether it be intentional or not, given how the muse is often a flighty one – that By Their Fruits gains its longevity; there are often points throughout the album’s eleven tracks where you can sense that Cult Of Suffering may be on the precipice of reaching further than their initial aspirations, and establishing themselves a foundation from which to launch a career.
As mentioned before, the version of Cult Of Suffering that you’re hearing on By Their Fruits is the result of a solo project whose ambitions were much larger than “one person in a bedroom”. Having recruited the assistance of musicans Robby Austian and Forest Carter on a few songs, most of what appears throughout By Their Fruits is the work of one Bruce Bales.
By Their Fruits clocks around forty-six minutes across eleven songs and initially wears all the hallmarks of being the solo bedroom black metal project that is an undercurrent of a lot of the underground, but what actually happens is there’s a lot more ideas present than the initial chosen genre might’ve allowed for. As a result, many of the songs could just as easily fall into melodeath, doom, melodic black, light metalcore, or a tiny bit of shoegaze, and you can understand how the list goes on and on from there. Not everything mentioned is overtly present either; a few are recognizable by virtue of them using a stock riff and others are more the “feel” of how a song is traversing its chosen time.
Does it all work as well? Not entirely, but there’s a charm to the open experimentation taking place within the mind of Cult Of Suffering that keeps things interesting, based on sheer insistence of leaping beyond a one-dimensional focus of worshipping at the altar of influences.
That’s not to say that after the introduction of…”Intro”, that the black metal conjuring that comprises “Fallen Arrow” isn’t appreciated. Even when Cult Of Suffering are shooting straight as an arrow they at least have the bona fides down enough that you can place it easily. They maintain a rawness throughout the song – which granted could be credited to the solo work flavoring of it – that only gives way when the song settles down for clean guitar and a quiet guitar solo. One of the more defining things – and an element we keep returning to – isn’t so much the regional black metal trappings of Cult Of Suffering but the semi-breaks in between, wherein the project takes aim at a variety of things.
By Their Fruits spends its time initially traversing black metal realms in the opening songs, but even those can be varied. “Loathe” seems to pull from Khold’s groove and the blackened-death world for its opening and double bass guitar rolls. The straightforward cymbal and snare stomp that propels the song forward is like a signal flare sent into the sky for that style. Yet, later on in the album you’ll have a song like “Gehenna” with its crazed sampled preacher rantings that is basically a death metal song.
“Gold Drinker” and “Enlightenment Through Pain” are songs well worth checking out beyond the confines of this album. Those are the two where Cult Of Suffering’s ambitions and ideals congeal the best. By Their Fruits’ traversing of influences results in rock-solid songs throughout, with its aforementioned opening numbers doing excellent work laying a black metal foundation that “Gold Drinker” and “Enlightenment Through Pain” expand upon.
In a fun bit of trivia – outside of them being lead-off singles before the album as a whole – both of the songs are among the longer ones on By Their Fruits. They don’t quite kiss the towering five and a half minutes and six-plus of “Conquete” and “By Their Fruits” but they also squash the life out of the grindcore-by-comparison and most melodic black metal song on this album, “Silver Tongue”, which at a petite two minutes and thirty-four seconds could be the high-speed introduction to “Gehenna” afterward.
So, in a perverse sense, the appeal for By Their Fruits lies just as much in what it is as what it is not. It is a pretty straightforward mostly solo-project black metal album that sounds like it spends its time lost in moss covered forests. It is just as much not a fully black metal album either, because the various other genre inspirations – which may have risen largely from circumstance – that are used to organically stitch songs together can be equally as interesting as the aforementioned black metal and blackened death metal highlights throughout the album.
It’s a brand of acheiving greatness by dogged determination rather than any one particular thing that is working in Cult Of Suffering’s favor here, and a promising future is being sewn in the seeds of this album. There’s an almost-there nature that keeps one coming back to By Their Fruits because the solid handful of times that Cult Of Suffering truly nails it on a song, they’re great. The rest is a collective of great parts, and it is just as much fun seeing how they get hammered together as it is just enjoying the music. By Their Fruits is one of those albums that might be worth getting in with on the ground floor.