25 Death Metal Albums That Had us Cacking our Pants in 2022!
No fuckin' Lorna Shore in here!
Cryptworm – Spewing Mephitic Putridity [UK]
Released: March 11th, 2022 via Me Saco un Ojo Records / Pulverised Records
With the entrails of prime Demilich oozing all over Cryptworm’s vomitous foul-smelling fetidness (god damn, we love a Thesaurus), Spewing Mephitic Putridity was a highlight in what was a ridiculously good year for old-school death metal.
Be disgusted. Be repulsed. Be anything but ashamed for diggin’ the shit out of such fetid nonsense and revel in the fact that bands like Cryptworm are still churning out death metal as gloriously rancid as this.
Spewing Mephitic Putridity slapped you in the meat-chops with 30 straight minutes of gloriously mindless death fuckin’ metal….what’s not to like?!
De Profundis – The Corruption of Virtue [UK]
Released: October 7th, 2022 via Transcending Obscurity Records
Why De Profundis aren’t a world renowned death metal act by now is beyond our comprehension. These guys are consistently better at this progressive / technical death metal lark than 99% of all other bands out there. That’s a fact. However, they still don’t seem to receive the dues we feel they so richly deserve.
We’ll just have to take solace in the fact we know how good they are and The Corruption Of Virtue reinforced our opinion. De Profundis wisely let their music to do the talking and they excelled themselves here; fashioning an album that was compact, concise and generally capable of crushing its enemies with as little fuss as possible. At heart, this was simply extreme metal at its absolute finest, with an exhaustive collection of ideas perfectly executed via 9 astonishingly succinct tirades.
The whole damn thing was relentlessly effective but the unholy triumvirate of “Desecrating Innocence”, “Religious Cancer” and “Scapegoat” didn’t just take the biscuit, they scoffed the whole fuckin’ pack! Stylistically diverse, terrifically technical and home to riffs that lodged themselves in your brain for days, this was De Profundis operating at the peak of their powers.
Dischordia – Triptych [USA]
Released: 9th April 2022, via Transcending Obscurity Records
Dischordia (as their name more than merely suggested) are jarring and disharmonious. They revel in angular sounds that cut through you like a hot knife through warm flesh (ouch!) before flights of progressive fancy send you down a path untravelled.
For instance, were you expecting moments of folky flute to break up the monstrous onslaught of “Bodies Of Ash”. No. Of course you fucking weren’t. Nonetheless, you’ll still find yourself thoroughly immersed in Dischordia’s strange new world when these interludes do arrive.
Fear not brutal death metal lovers, as the band soon returned to an appropriate level of aural nastiness but it’s Dischordia’s progressive nature that stayed with you long after the blasting had ruined what ever was left of your already fragile ears!
Entrails – An Eternal Time of Decay [Sweden]
Did the world really need another Swedish death metal album in the vein of classic bands like Entombed and Dismember?
No, of course not.
However, did those of us who were raised on the genre want another album entering this already over-stuffed, Boss HM-2 pedal driven, sub-genre?
Hell yeah!
Fortunately for us freaks, Entrails‘ respectable seventh festering album, An Eternal Time of Decay, was a grotesque opus dominated by horror-obsessed lyrics and that grimy Stockholm death metal sound. Unsurprisingly, Entrails were uninterested in pushing the boundaries of old-school death metal in any new direction whatsoever. Fortunately, these maniacs are highly skilled at creating just the right amount of catchy and caustic songs filled with the type of grooves we love, the d-beat rhythms we desire and plenty of melodic solos. Bitchin’.
Immolation – Acts Of God [USA]
Released: February 18th, 2022 via Nuclear Blast
Where would 99% of the current crop of death metal bands be without the mighty Immolation? They’d probably be ripping off Incantation instead but, regardless, we’re discussing the originators here and Immolation triumphantly returned in 2022 with their 11th studio album, Acts Of God.
When you’ve been pounding eardrums since 1988, you’ve no right sounding so fuckin’ vital in 2022. However, this is Immolation we’re talking about and, unsurprisingly, Acts Of God was every inch the mandatory death metal album of the year.
These guys don’t put our bad albums (not one misstep in their entire back catalogue, right!) and while Acts Of God may have been a weighty tome – 55 mins of intense brutality is bordering on too much for even the most toughened death metal fan to carry – it maintained the 100% hit rate of this most enduring of bands.
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