AN NCS PREMIERE: INNARDS — “ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH HATE”

 

Victor Costa‘s cover art for the debut EP of the Portuguese death metal band Innards is a perfect accompaniment for the ghoulish delights the EP holds in store. The music, like the art, is an eruption of cemetery horrors coming right for your throat. In other words, this isn’t lurching, cadaverous death metal, even though it’s decidedly gruesome and rotten to the core. No, Innards (true to their name) are coming for your guts with unhinged relish. The EP’s title is thus similarly appropriate: Back From The Grave, Straight In Your Face.

There are only three songs on the EP, but they make for an explosive first strike. Two of those songs have previously debuted, and today we’ve got the premiere of the third one, an absolutely crazed onslaught wonderfully named “Enlightenment Through Hate“, which features none other than guest vocals by Kam Lee of Massacre and a guitar solo by none other than Frank Blackfire from Sodom. And with all three tracks now out in the world, you have a fully informed basis for picking up the record well in advance of its February 21st release by Transcending Obscurity Records.

 

 

When DECIBEL premiered one of these three tracks, they included a statement by bassist Rui Gil about Innard’s inspirations: “This band is the return to our musical origins. The old school ’80s European thrash metal combined with the late ’80s/early ’90s Florida death metal/grindcore. A real time travel and the wet dream of any OSDM fan proudly served in the most visceral way!”

It really is both a time travel experience and a wet dream for fans of the bands that Transcending Obscurity lists as references: Death, Gruesome, Grave, Impetigo, early Carcass, Cattle Decapitation, Pestilence, Repulsion, Feral, and Paganizer.

 

The opening track “Intro – Night Of The Anthropophagous” is a savage mission statement — grisly, cruel, and maniacally marauding. Hugo Andremon‘s seething and roiling fret-work, a neck-snapping drum rhythm executed by Rolando Barros, and Gil’s ominous bass contortions pave the way to the vicious pulsations of a thrashy riff and Andremon’s deep roaring bellows and lunatic shrieks, complemented by insectile arpeggios and a pair of wild, eerie, fret-burning solos that send the music to further heights of macabre insanity.

And then you’ll come to the song we’re premiering today, “Enlightenment Through Hate“. It features even faster drum battery and perhaps even more deranged tremolo’d riffing, which channels flesh-eating frenzies. Madness and damnation reign supreme, amplified by truly terrorizing vocals that seem stripped of all humanity (and certainly stripped of all sanity). Relentless in its hell-for-leather pacing all the way through, it’s still a head-hammering onslaught, and the song seems to find an even higher gear of eviscerating fanaticism when Blackfire enters the fray to deliver a spectacularly over-the-top solo.

One might suspect that for the closing track Innards would change things up a bit, and “The Fog” is a bit less berserker than the preceding track, at least at first, but the band’s devotion to full-throttle, skull-busting, adrenaline-fueled rampaging comes through again, this time with dismal and diseased riffing that seems to convey a kind of desperate hopelessness in the midst of the mayhem. To set the stage for the flame-spitting solo in this song, the band also lock into a highly headbangable groove, but they end the song and the EP with a crazed gallop and another electrifying dose of vocal grotesquery and mutilating guitar savagery.

 

Transcending Obscurity is presenting the EP in a variety of formats, with related merch, and you can get details about all that via the links below.  Also below, in addition to our song premiere, we’ve included the Bandcamp player where you can check out the other two songs. Enjoy!

PRE-ORDER:
https://innardsdeath.bandcamp.com/

INNARDS:
https://facebook.com/Innards.DeathMetal.PT

TRANSCENDING OBSCURITY:
http://tometal.com/
http://facebook.com/transcendingobscurityrecords