Stupid us, until recently we’ve slept on the Boston-based death metal band Bacterial Husk. Based on what we’re hearing from their forthcoming debut album Anthropogenic Ruin, that was probably a grievous error, because the album is a mind-boggling hellraiser.
It’s not the band’s first effort, having been preceded by a 2016 EP named Agnosia of Omens and the 2018 single “Mystics of Transmutation“, and the band’s members have been involved in other past and current projects, including Boston thrashers Razormaze and the brutal death metal of Scattered Remnants.
But in some ways Anthropogenic Ruin sounds like a very different beast than what’s come before — both more technically spectacular, more fiendishly berserk, maybe more vicious, and possibly even more bone-breaking, while changing moods almost as fast as the band shift among tempos and riffs.
We’ve got a prime example of what we’re trying to describe in today’s premiere of the song “Flayed By Anomalies“.
Photo Credit: G. Mortimer
“Flayed By Anomalies” is a head-spinning experience of madness, menace, and misery. For roughly the first half of the track the band quickly teleport listener’s brains into a centrifuge and start spinning it at electrifying speed. They hurl a panoply of fast-changing riffs that somehow get stuck in the head despite the fact that they feverishly whine, blurt, and quiver, and are stitched together by fast bursts of manically jittery fretwork.
That’s the madness, both exultant and disturbing, and the lunacy is anchored by equally manic bass-lines and truly jaw-dropping drumwork, and fronted by a tandem of monstrous gutturals and goblin snarls.
Around the song’s mid-point, that whipping centrifuge of sound slows, the gravel-toned bass gets a moment in the spotlight, and the chords become sinister and clawing (though darting arpeggios and crazed screams remind us that the madness has not left the house). The drumming still seizes attention like gunshots in the street, but the music descends into degradation and agony.
BACTERIAL HUSK is:
Evan Duplessis – Vocals, Guitar
Joey Adams – Guitar
John Lattuca – Bass
Nick Lazzaro – Drums, Vocals
They describe this new album as “the soundtrack to mankind’s oblivion through man-made, unnatural, and celestial anomalies”. “Humankind is doomed and Bacterial Husk have the riffs to manifest its destruction.”
Anthropogenic Ruin was produced by Joey Adams and Bacterial Husk (with drum tracking by Ben Rogers at Loud Sun Studio in New Hampshire), mixed by Joey Adams, and mastered by Dave Otero at Flatline Audio in Denver. The eye-catching cover art is the work of Matt Stikker.
The album will be released on October 27th on CD and digital formats, and it’s up for pre-order now. Below, we’re also including streams of two previously released singles from the album, “Chemically Evolved” and “Plague Pollination“.
Both of them are just as dynamic in movement and mood as the track we’ve just premiered, though “Chemically Evolved” also administers a jackhammering, neck-ruining beating, and is home to a fantastic guitar solo, while “Plague Pollination” both veers back toward the convulsive lunacy of “Flayed By Anomalies” and sets up a head-hammering groove as the backdrop for a chillingly otherworldly solo.
PRE-ORDER:
https://bacterialhusk.bandcamp.com/album/anthropogenic-ruin
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