Gaze upon the fabulously ghastly cover art for Necrotum‘s new album Defleshed Exhumation and you’ll know that death metal will follow.
The writhing and hook-lined tentacles, their shadows stretching into the endless distance, the skeletons immersed in putrefying fluids, all of it overseen by the sunken eyes of a looming death’s head, it all foretells gruesome horrors to come.
But what kind of death metal awaits us? Surely something rancid, surely something influenced by progenitors from the ’90s… and those guesses prove to be correct, but don’t go far enough, as you’ll understand when you hear the track we’re premiering today in advance of the album’s January release by Memento Mori.
Youthful though they are, Necrotum have been churning out music from their Romanian homeland at a hellish pace, with a pair of albums and lots of shorter releases dotting their discography like pustules just since 2019, and will now add to that with this forthcoming third full-length.
Previous releases brought to mind influences from the likes of Cannibal Corpse, Incantation, Wombbath, Broken Hope, and Grave, among others, but their new album also conjures memories of Monstrosity, Mortal Decay, and especially Deeds of Flesh and early Suffocation.
And a sharper production brings all the ingredients to vivid life, but without purging the foulness that rots and roils the music.
“Shattered Flow of Time” stands as a fine example, which is to say a horrific but thoroughly head-spinning example, of what Necrotum are up to now.
They split the guitar tone between grisliness and delirium, putrescent in the lower end and crazed in the upper reaches where the strings swirl in flurries of dementia. Lower still, the bass brutishly slugs and the vocals growl in the gutters while the snare snaps and batters.
The music changes relentlessly, heaving and screaming, writhing and swarming, and administering traumatic pile-driver grooves in the midst of all the intricate and thoroughly crazed contortions. It thus proves to be a technically impressive piece of work, albeit one obviously conceived in madness.
That vividly gruesome cover art is the work of Slimeweaver. The album is set for release by Memento Mori on January 22nd. For more info, keep an eye on the locations linked below.
Also below, you can take in the first single from the album, “Warped In Entrails“, which sounds very much like what you’d expect from the title. It reinforces the impression that this trio are technically quite skilled, brazenly deranged in their songwriting, and as adept at wildly spinning heads as they are at brutishly fracturing skulls.
MEMENTO MORI:
http://memento-mori.es
http://www.memento-mori.es/releases.php
https://www.facebook.com/memento.mori.label
NECROTUM:
https://www.facebook.com/necrotumdm
https://necrotumdeathmetal.bandcamp.com/