(This is DGR’s review of the latest album from a Fort Worth band who now call themselves Asylum TX.)

Texas-based tech-death group Asylum – now operating under the name Asylum TX – are a band we’ve been following for some time now, iInitially as a group that showed a surprising amount of promise from seemingly out of nowhere in the death metal world, but then afterward because the group’s music kept making strange twists and turns.

Where Asylum TX were looking to take their music was not something we would have expected or guessed. 2021’s Sharpen, for instance, is a lengthy album that treads the line between tech-death and something more amateurishly explorative of various forms of hallucinogens. It was an hour-plus worth of music that felt like a group of stellar musicians who had fallen into a weird Alex Grey by way of Tool rabbit hole and then taking the wildest swing at making a death metal album about it. Prior EPs and their 2017 album Psalms Of Paralysis had been more straightforward in that regard, as Asylum bore the marks of more than one Cattle Decapitation-influenced twist on their sound.

Five years removed from Sharpen, however, and Asylum – again, wearing a new visage as Asylum TX – once again sound as if they’re a completely different band who’ve come up with something far more angular in its approach than a traditional tech-death release for their newest album Cultus Inoxia. Continue reading »