The best metal on Bandcamp this month includes a dispatch from the death metal scene in Botswana, an unusually human microtonal black metal album, death-racing Austrian speed metal, and much more.
Overthrust
Infected by Myth
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Infected by Myth Overthrust
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Botswana’s heavy metal cowboy subculture has been extensively documented in photo essays, travelogues, and scholarly books, but we don’t get to hear a new full-length album from the sub-Saharan country’s scene very often. Overthrust, from the northern village of Ghanzi, have kept busy with splits, EPs, and live shows, but they haven’t released an LP since their 2015 debut, Desecrated Deeds to Decease. With its long-awaited follow-up, Infected by Myth, they’ve made what might be the definitive Botswanan death metal album. It’s nasty, vicious, and ruthlessly efficient in its bloodletting. Most of the album lands somewhere between the blood-drenched rumble of Cannibal Corpse, the chromatic brutality of Suffocation, and the ignorant stomp of Internal Bleeding, but the perspective is entirely Overthrust’s own. With its post-colonial blend of Christianity and indigenous religions, Botswana is often hostile to the death metal culture, which is suppressed and seen as demonic. Infected by Myth has the courage to spit back in the face of that mindset, with excoriating songs like “Slaves of Myth” and “Silenced Voice of Holy.” (The cover art, which depicts an unsettling laying on of hands, is a savvy callback to Death’s Spiritual Healing.) The band sound like they’re having a hell of a lot of fun, too. “Overthrust Deathmental” is a self-mythologizing anthem on par with Iron Maiden’s “Iron Maiden,” and it’s easy to imagine it whipping up a wild mosh pit on the savanna at the band’s own Vulture Thrust Metal Fest in Ghanzi. It’s powerful enough to make you want to book a flight.
Scarcity
The Promise of Rain
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The Promise of Rain Scarcity
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette, T-Shirt/Shirt
On their 2022 debut, the harrowing Aveilut, Scarcity was a duo project. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers composed a single 45-minute piece and divided it into five movements, layering on endless guitar tracks and inviting Doug Moore to sing over them. The result was a microtonal black metal album that was as effective as it was impractical. The Promise of Rain, Aveilut’s even more impressive successor, sees Scarcity’s membership expand to five. Everything on The Promise of Rain was played live in the room, and while it’s still a slippery, dense work, the album has an unmistakably human heartbeat. Some of that is thanks to Moore, also of Pyrrhon and Glorious Depravity, who has never sounded better. Cut loose from his death metal bands, he’s able to claw his way to a Rainer Landfermann howl and a Bryan Funck snarl, in addition to the scraping, mid-range black metal rasp he uses for much of the album. Behind him, Randall-Myers conducts pieces that are dizzyingly complex but tend to feel intuitive. Even the 11-minute “Scorched Vision,” by far the most convoluted track on the album, unfolds according to a coherent—if twisted—internal logic. Conceptually, The Promise of Rain is an extended allegory about meeting difficult people and difficult landscapes on their own terms. That metaphor naturally extends to difficult music, and if you listen to Scarcity looking for something easy to digest, you’ll probably be let down. But if you submit to its peculiar rhythms, you’ll be rewarded with one of the finest, most thought-provoking black metal albums of the year.
Death Racer
From Gravel to Grave
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From Gravel to Grave Dying Victims Productions
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
If you haven’t seen Death Race 2000, Paul Bartel’s 1975 exploitation flick about a cross-country road race where points are awarded for killing pedestrians, you should probably do that before listening to the debut album by Austria’s Death Racer. From Gravel to Grave is so thoroughly suffused with that film’s gasoline-soaked sensibility that it plays like an unofficial soundtrack. The band’s blackened speed metal assault is rough, raw, and mean-spirited. It sounds like it should be billowing out of a muscle car alongside the diesel exhaust. Like their presumptive heroes in Venom, Death Racer’s collective tongue is planted firmly in their cheek on songs like “Motormentor” and “Traumatized in Traffic Jam Ejection.” Don’t mistake that for musical unseriousness. From Gravel to Grave is a ripping speed metal album with a clever, brilliantly executed gimmick.
Defacement
Duality
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Duality Defacement
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Vinyl LP
Let’s start at the end: the album-closing title track from Defacement’s Duality is 16 minutes long, and it’s a haunted labyrinth of warped riffa*ge, inhuman drumming, and unsettling atmospherics. It’s the song that the Utrecht band has been building up to for three albums now, a truly jaw-dropping expression of their capabilities that cements them as one of the most ambitious extreme metal acts in the burgeoning Dutch scene. It’s the most obvious highlight on Duality, but it’s far from the only one. Throughout the album, the trio hone their proprietary blend of chaotic black metal and dissonant death metal, hitting on a sound in the same sonic ballpark as bands like Thantifaxath and Ulcerate. Duality’s short instrumental tracks, too accomplished to be considered mere “interludes,” are pulsing bursts of industrial and electronic noise that are good enough to become the basis of a whole other project. Defacement have been worth keeping an eye on for a while now, but it’s clear that they’ve hit a new level.
Piah Mater
Under the Shadow of a Foreign Sun
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Under the Shadow of a Foreign Sun Piah Mater
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
There aren’t too many bands who sound like classic Opeth. One imagines it’s not for lack of trying. On their best albums, the Stockholm legends played an incredibly demanding mix of prog rock and death metal, a style that few bands have the chops or the chutzpah to pull off. Piah Mater, an adroit and ambitious duo from Rio de Janeiro, are equal to the task. Under the Shadow of a Foreign Sun is their third album, and it credibly cribs from prog-death bibles like 2001’s Blackwater Park and 2002’s Deliverance. (Bassist Martin Méndez and drummer Martin López, both from Uruguay, appeared on those Opeth records, and the Latin flair that characterized their playing is certainly echoed here.) Vocalist Luiz Felipe Netto even sounds a lot like Mikael Åkerfeldt, his delivery flecked with a Brazilian accent rather than a Swedish one. Netto switches from English to Portuguese on the epic ballad “Canícula,” a duet with the bossa nova singer Isadora Melo. The song still nods to Opeth in sound and structure, but the local twist makes it the most exciting track on the record, and perhaps a promising harbinger of things to come.
Vuur & Zijde
Boezem
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Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Fans of forward-thinking Dutch metal should salivate when they see the list of bands that ’s membership pulls from—Laster, Silver Knife, Terzij de Horde, Grey Aura, and Witte Wieven, among others. There’s a whole lot of talent in this newish venture, and that’s before even mentioning the bewitching Famke C., who makes her full-length debut as a singer on Boezem. On the album, Vuur & Zijde are fundamentally a post-punk band, but they take enough detours into blistering black metal to keep things unpredictable. (The band’s earliest material, for a 2020 split with Impavida, was more explicitly black metal, but lead songwriter Nicky H. has dramatically reconfigured things for Boezem.) Frequently, though, this is music fit for dancing at the goth club, anchored by gloomy riffs, Sylwin C.’s buoyant basslines, and Famke’s austere, melodic vocals.
Todesstoss
Das Liebweh-Dekret
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Das Liebweh-Dekret I, Voidhanger Records
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Compact Disc (CD)
Martin Lang’s Todesstoss is one of the most unrepentantly bizarre metal projects of all time. The Munich native is a sly surrealist, and the art he puts out under the Todesstoss banner tends to be a little nightmarish—the way an actual nightmare feels, that is, not like the splatter-flick imagery of most ostensibly “scary” metal. In grainy photos, Lang depicts himself wearing long tubes over his arms, or contemplating a cereal bowl full of dirt with a white bag over his head. The music has often mirrored the iconography. His best record, 2015’s Hirngemeer, is a brilliant, frustrating avant-metal masterpiece that unspools according to rules that only Lang could possibly understand. By the standards of the Todesstoss discography, Das Liebweh-Dekret (“The Love Sickness”) is downright normal. Across its six songs, you’ll find depressive, hypnotic black metal, recorded in the primitivist style of the Norwegian Second Wave. Stranger things lurk within. Organic drum sounds tussle with programmed beats; riffs dissolve into vapor. The vocals, from Lang as well as collaborators W. and Lydia, are rigid and ritualistic, except for when they sound small and terrified. Das Liebweh-Dekret isn’t quite at the pinnacle of Todesstoss’s catalog, but it’s another singular work by a true iconoclast.
Void Witch
Horripilating Presence
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Horripilating Presence Everlasting Spew Records
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T-Shirt/Shirt, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD)
As a self-proclaimed “bunch of middle-aged dads,” the Austinites in Void Witch might seem like inauspicious vessels for soul-flaying, Peaceville Three-style death/doom. Never underestimate the darkness of parenting. Horripilating Presence is a perversely inviting black hole of stone-carved doom riffs, harmonized leads, crepuscular atmosphere, and bellowing vocals. The long shadow of early Paradise Lost looms over the proceedings, and fans of Detroit gloom lords Temple of Void should find plenty to like here, too. Void Witch remind us that “dad rock” can be anything that happens when dads get together and rock.
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