Label - Century Media
Release Date - 26th January 2024
Words - Tony Bliss
Vitriol are bloody terrifying. Indeed, as much as the recent tsunami of high-grade death metal is typified by a low-key desire to be the fastest and heaviest, this Portland foursomes churning, bloodthirsty onslaught is so wilfully fucked up and violent, it sounds less the work of mere humans and more something invoked from a freshly unearthed grimoire. Whilst 2019’s To Bathe From The Throat Of Cowardice may occasionally have doffed its cap to Immolation and Hate Eternal, the band's hellish, ultra-brutal approach still felt a million miles away from the usual death metal formula, and Suffer And Become - somewhat miraculously - raises the stakes even higher in terms of sheer sonic nightmare fuel.
They seem to hit their unhinged zenith right off the bat, as ‘Shame And It’s Afterbirth’ sinks its teeth in amidst some crazed tempo shifts and the emanating strangeness of dissonant black metal, the whole psychotic shebang a landslide of nail-bomb riffing and some braying, squealing guitar leads evil enough to conjure mental images of Trey Azagthoth and Kerry King duking it out amid a particularly nasty exorcism. However, as ‘The Flowers Of Sadism’ dials down the pace a tad and begins to sound (quite literally) like being buried alive in some sort of cave collapse, and ‘The Flood Of Predation’ comes across like a guttural deluge straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, we begin to realize that Vitriol have an unholy knack for upping the ante every single time.
And so, by the time we reach the final proclamation of war in ‘He Will Fight Savagely’, eyebrows deep in blast-beat insanity and aglow with trem-picking hellfire, it’s pretty much a nailed-on fact - Vitriol’s brand of dizzying, epic drama taps into the unearthly, old testament atmosphere and commanding menace of death metals ancient code with ten times the authority of their peers. Avoid this at your peril, death heads.
8.5/10
Comments