AN NCS PREMIERE: ETERNAL ROT — “SWOLLEN CORPSE ADORATION”

When you gaze upon Mark Riddick‘s cover art for the new album by Eternal Rot, you know what’s coming. You know that little cross will provide no defense against the rotting horrors that have crawled from their graves to extract a ghastly vengeance. You also know, even if you haven’t previously encountered this band’s music, that their brand of death metal is murder most foul — diseased, disgusting, and depraved — but it’s also the kind of “ignorant, knuckle-dragging stomp” that’s calculated to crush skulls and wreck necks.

Those quoted words aren’t ours — they’re part of the PR previews offered on behalf of the two labels who will jointly release this band’s third album, Moribound, on July 24th — Memento Mori and Godz Ov War Productions. But don’t mistake those words as some kind of criticism. It’s just a way of highlighting the fact that Eternal Rot disdain pretension and favor the primitive — but we must quickly add that their rotten and ruinous brand of organ-rupturing and bone-smashing extremity is as catchy as it is bludgeoning.

As you can see from the title of the song we’re premiering today, Eternal Rot also have a way with words, the kind that brings devilish smiles to fiendish faces.

But before we get to “Swollen Corpse Adoration“, let’s first reprise our own first impressions of the new album’s first single — “Desecrated Guts“.

At first, you’ll hear spooky ambient whispers, gloomy Gregorian chants, and what might be sounds of distant dungeon-deep torture. And then… then the neck-wrecking begins, preceded by a militaristic snare tattoo.

Those sounds of torture become fully manifest in the crazed and crocodilian vocal cacophonies and in shrill, boiling guitars, but the main force is the application of a brutal, mid-paced sonic pile-driver. You’ll be a few inches shorter after you hear this, or at least pounded knee-deep into the ground.

A thoroughly gruesome, malignant, and deranged experience, ruthlessly simple in its ingredients (other than the twisted compilations of vocal depravity), but it knows where your reptile brain lives and asserts squatter’s rights there.

And now let’s begin our adoration of swollen corpses.

With a sequence of quivering and groaning riffage this song immediately creates an atmosphere of preternatural menace. While the drummer starts trying to punch his way through your body cavity, a shrill guitar begins convulsing in episodes of bizarre ecstasy. With the advent of ghastly gurgling growls, the guitars create a more grim, grisly, and grievous mood — though the band also periodically return to that insidiously infectious opening riff.

The riffing continues to change in many pernicious ways, buzzing and whirring, writhing and raking, descending and elevating, all of it ghastly, and continually backed by clobbering drum-fills, punishing double-kick rumbles, and vocals that are relentlessly grotesque and disgustingly macabre.

As before, this nastiness is also damned infectious. You’ll see:

While that song is still punching your spine and wriggling through you mind like maggots, let’s add a bit of background for newcomers to Eternal Rot:

The band began in 2012 in London through the hideous death metal passion of Mayer and Grindak. Shortly after the release of their debut album Cadaverine, those two were joined by Radek Pierściński (Meat Spreader, Neuropathia, The Dead Goats) on drums, and the result in 2020 was the band’s second album, Putridarium. A year later they participated in a split release with the death/doom powerhouse Coffins, and now we will soon have this new album.

The pair of releasing labels recommend it for fans of Autopsy, Undergang, Hooded Menace, Rippikoulu, Anatomia, Disma, Coffins, Grave, Incantation, and Funebrarum.

MEMENTO MORI:
http://www.memento-mori.es/

GODZ OV WAR:
bit.ly/shop_eternal_rot
https://godzovwarproductions.bandcamp.com/album/moribound

ETERNAL ROT:
https://eternalrot.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/EternalRot