Our recent interview of Proscrito’s guitarist Ricard is one of the most fiendishly entertaining I’ve read in years. Referring to himself and his two bandmates as “boneheaded traditionalists”, he identified their musical and non-musical influences as a mix of “Cianide, Winter, Autopsy, Necro Schizma, Asphyx, Master, Death Strike, early Bolt Thrower, Slaughter, Corrupted, maybe some Samael’s Worship Him, Bestial Summoning and SadEx/Profanatica’s slow parts,” as well as “miscellaneous stuff like garbage bins and general filth, abandoned factories, violence, processions, whips, cilices, Conan the Barbarian flicks and Robert E. Howard stories, leather, spikes, bullet belts, smoke, Frank Frazetta, old westerns, instincts, war atrocities, roadkill, women who lied to me, Hieronymous Bosch, excess, alienation, concrete, broken glass, Francisco de Goya, plenty of books and bizarre, deranged movies, urine….”

There’s a lot more to enjoy in the interview, including discussions of Spanish cultural influences on Proscrito’s music, the reasons for the band’s decision to write their lyrics in their mother tongue (“Spanish lyrics may keep us away from the politically correct crusades if some day anything goes too pointy for the lobbies that demand safe spaces in metal, haha… not that we’re singing for a brighter future for blond children or anything like that”), the production strategy for their debut album as compared to their previous EP (“Llagas y Estigmas shows a rather metallic approach instead of that sludgish former outcome, partly due to a higher tuning, it keeps a coherent line of agonic granulated screams, reverbed monolithic drums, piercing rhythm guitar headaches, wah soloing pain, and disgusting bass lines that will satiate anyone who truly enjoyed our debut MCD/MLP”), and Ricard’s vision of the perfect death/doom album (“It must place its stress in metal and death, the right old influences… Slow decay, rottenness, the crunchy taste of worms, greenflies, the noise of crepitating flesh at the crematorium, and the stench of formaldehyde are needed, too”).

Well, I should stop with the interview excerpts. The point of today’s post is to furnish some of the actual music itself from Proscrito’s new album in advance of its January 27 release by Memento Mori… but you really should read the interview if you want some hearty smiles and to learn a few things worth knowing, and not only about the band and what drives them. Now let’s turn to the song we’re premiering, “Marcado por la Pezuña“. Continue reading »