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The most prominent and significant American death/funeral doom emissaries EVOKEN succeed their 2018 landmark Hypnagogia album with their seventh full-length opus Mendacium set for release on Oct 17. A work that will reveal itself as one of the darkest and most oppressive EVOKEN albums among their unparalleled repertoire.

Where 2018’s Hypnagogia would see the band capture and focus on a more melancholic, tangible, and even more of an accessible sonic design, Mendacium takes that acute shift back to the monumental dirge-like dread and woeful catacombic and disharmonious heaviness reminiscent of the band’s Quietus and Antitheses of Light masterworks. All while still encapsulating the tectonic-shifting nature of their Caress of the Void and Atra Mors releases while venturing more through classic gothic audial textures and even treading a little down experimental mire as well, reminiscing an aura seeping from such luminary artists as Dead Can Dance, Monumentum, and Disembowelment.

To signal this shift in sound harking back to this previous era, the band would recall the services of producer Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal who worked with EVOKEN on their Antithesis of Light and Quietus albums respectively. The result being Mendacium capturing a sepulchral heaviness saturated in ambience with even more of an emphasis on deathlike dread and anguish; an ambience reflecting the depths and catacombs of an ancient cathedral or monastery, ultimately defining Mendacium as EVOKEN’s most powerful sounding album to date.

B2 Purple / Sea Blue Merge

Debut album of Philadelphia unholy metal band after several EP releases

For fans of Vastum, Krypts, Phrenelith, Master, Incantation, Abhorrence, Funebrarum, Disembowelment

Three years after their crushing debut Defiled In Oblivion, Castrator return with Coronation Of The Grotesque, an album that not only exceeds all expectations but leaves them shattered in its wake, firmly cementing the band among the North American death metal elite. 

A bludgeoning autopsy of death metal, gore and deathgrind, the low-tuned grooves, discordant leads and mid-tempo rumble of Cerebral Rot is evident in tracks like “Spinous Forms Of Mortal Abhorrence” and the title-track while setting the bar for a melted transformation into more ghastly liquified forms. The gargling slime vox of Ian Schwab are dangerously radioactive, summoned straight from the sealed basement of a nuked morgue narrating a splatter-fest of morbid poetry, decomposing flesh, absurd experiments, and gruesome transgression. Each song plays out like a medical examiner’s case file crossed with the fevered ramblings of a psychopath—precise in its anatomical horror and repugnant in its bizarre depravity.

A bludgeoning autopsy of death metal, gore and deathgrind, the low-tuned grooves, discordant leads and mid-tempo rumble of Cerebral Rot is evident in tracks like “Spinous Forms Of Mortal Abhorrence” and the title-track while setting the bar for a melted transformation into more ghastly liquified forms. The gargling slime vox of Ian Schwab are dangerously radioactive, summoned straight from the sealed basement of a nuked morgue narrating a splatter-fest of morbid poetry, decomposing flesh, absurd experiments, and gruesome transgression. Each song plays out like a medical examiner’s case file crossed with the fevered ramblings of a psychopath—precise in its anatomical horror and repugnant in its bizarre depravity.

Decrepisy returns with brutally gothic doom-laden death metal on their second full-length album, Deific Mourning. Leaning heavier on the doom side of death than their first output, Emetic Communion, Deific Mourning pulls from goth-industrial influences that seep through the infected wounds that comprise the decomposing body of the album. Each track a stage of grief and unbelief as life abandons form into the mystery of the unknown. Stillborn in anxiety, grief, and sickness, every riff agonizingly culled from terror, despair and disintegration of a dying form. A body desecrated by vaccine damage, an inflamed nervous system and dysautonomia, pumping fear into every heart beat and waking moment. Deific Mourning was recorded by Charles Koryn (Ascended Dead, Chthonic Deity, Thanamagus) at Elektric City Recording with Vocal tracking, Reamping, mixing, and mastering handled by Greg Wilkinson (Autopsy, Necrot, Mortuous) at Earhammer Studio. Additional vocals, synths, and noisescapes performed by Leila Abdul-Rauf (Hammers of Misfortune, Saros, Vastum) and Gabriel Lageson. Cover illustrations by Kyle House (Acephalix, Necrot, Vastum) with an additional inner sculpture by Emil Melmoth.

B-side collection of doom-laden dark heavy metal band’s 2024 critical juggernaut The Stygian Rose (Decibel Magazine’s Best Album Of The Year)

Features a transcendental revisioning of Mayhem’s “Dem Mysteriis Doom Sathanas”