(This is TheMadIsraeli’s review of the forthcoming third album by the Swedish band Repuked, set for release on October 9th by Soulseller Records.)
One of my favorite death metal bands of all time are Austrian grime lords Pungent Stench. They were a band who were all about writing some of the most grotesque, shamelessly filthy, and perverse death metal possible from both a lyrical and sonic standpoint. They had a sound that was really all their own. Bands tried to imitate them, but no one has ever quite reaped their influence and managed to make it work well. I always felt they were kind of the next step up from legendary death masters Autopsy, an evolution.
Repuked is the equivalent to that in relation to Pungent Stench. A lot of things about their sound line up the same way. Super-grimy, sludgy, yet buzzsaw guitars, a dedication to a mixture of doom, D-beat and atonal fast-as-fuck viciousness combined with a love of absolutely perverse over-the-top lyrical subject matter. They offer a kind of death metal that is pretty hard to come by nowadays, the shit that is all about reveling in the darkest aspects of the genre. Dawn Of Reintoxication, the band’s upcoming record, is quite possibly the most disgustingly impactful brutal death metal record of the whole year.
The Swedes do a good job of channeling both those Autopsy and Pungent Stench influences, but they also bring in a lot of Grave and Dismember influences into the mix as well. The result is what it might sound like if you took a mixture of sewage and corpses and ran it through a grinder that broke down half way through the process. Combine this with a penchant for writing some deliciously sinister melodic hooks and fantastic death-grind power-chord shuffling, and Repuked are unstoppable in hitting you with a shot of adrenaline and a side of rabies. The three-pronged vocal assault of guitarists Richard Rimjob and Nicke Piss along with bass player Rob The Slob is one of the most utterly depraved and delightfully unhinged vocal presences in death metal I’ve heard this year.
If you’re interested in a fantastic death metal record that mixes the filthy, cavernous tonality and doomy elements of Autopsy, the grotesque presentation and viciously unhinged nature of Pungent Stench, Grave’s sense of groove, and Dismember’s sense of melody, you will love Dawn Of Reintoxication when it arrives on October 9th. One of my favorite death metal standouts this year.
PRE-ORDER:
https://soulsellerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dawn-of-reintoxication
REPUKED:
https://www.facebook.com/Repuked/