Photo by Spider Digits Studio
One look at the three members of Baltimore-based Wrektomb would lead aficionados of extreme metal to expect death metal steeped in horror and gore. But while the band’s music is indeed gut-gouging and ghastly, it’s also far more than that, revealing other dimensions you’d never guess at from their abominable, blood-stained appearances.
Those listeners who encountered Wrektomb‘s debut EP, Hollowed Socket Nystagmus in 2021, already have some idea of what we’re hinting at, but their debut album, Bovine Mockeries of Human Posturing, is an even more powerful display of just how many different musical facets Wrektomb have worked into their macabre gems.
As a prime example, today we premiere the song “Unexpected Encounter´s With Nature´s Order” in advance of the album’s release by Personal Records on April 5th.
Before we get to the new music, we want to share the strange conceptual focus of the album, which may (or may not) help in understanding the album’s title:
[E]ach song tells a gory and depraved tale: human deviants engaged in self-mutilation to feel something other than apathy and disdain. With crushing force, the Red Heifer, the Divine bovine, tramples temples and pulverizes the pride of arrogant, unsuspecting victims for their misplaced worship. Time travel through the multiverse is exploited by an impulse to sire lineage across time and space. Modernity’s zeitgeist ruled by indoctrination with vapid values of the psychopath’s all-consuming black hole of derangement – unable to satiate the hunger for carnage and the carnal – culminating in a reflection on defeat, finding the meaning of life in the decomposition of the flesh: the height of human achievement in transforming into feed for the corvids and carrion-eaters of the sky.
So, as you can tell from that description, Wrektomb‘s new album isn’t just a tale of serial killers and human dissection, any more than the music is just a display of gore-core. It turns out to be imaginative, elaborate, even mesmerizing, and as likely to appeal to fans of heart-sinking doom as to fans of gut-carving metal of death.
Wrektomb announce the song we’re presenting today by interspersing guitars that sound like the whine of a dismal siren with bursts of pulverizing groove, and then adding grotesque vocal expulsions, like a ghoul roaring while simultaneously gorging itself on viscera.
Having set the stage in that ghastly fashion, Wrektomb begin unraveling a song that turns out to be more multi-faceted than you might first expect. Slowing the pace, they move into a grief-stricken melody that seems to moan and to wail in the high end like a ghost, even as the ghoul continues to growl and the rhythm section continue to inflict groovesome punishment.
The music flows like a congealing underworld river made of tears and blood, heart-breaking and very heavy. As it heaves its way forward, still backed by clobbering beats and a hard-slugging bass, a gloriously stricken guitar solo spirals outward. The layered guitars seem to slither like a massive serpent and to glisten like filaments of gold, collectively (and elegantly) creating a potent but tragic spell.
WREKTOMB is:
Nick Krostoff – Maestro of Misery
Dieter Itis – Beats of Dread
Vera Kätzin – Death and Resurrection
The album was mixed and mastered by Endarker Studio and includes cover art and layout by Misanthropic-Art, and it’s available for pre-order now.
Below you’ll also find a stream of the new album’s first single, “Gored Into Reality“, a song that reinforces the ideas we’ve been trying to express above. It’s brutish and bowel-loosening, nightmarish and nasty, but also intricate (especially the performances of the rhythm section, who threaten to steal the show), and a moving expression of despondency and despair that includes a haunting piano melody at the end. It’s also catchy as hell.
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.personal-records.com/product/pre-order-wrektomb-bovine-mockeries-of-human-posturing/
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/bovine-mockeries-of-human-posturing
WREKTOMB:
https://www.facebook.com/wrektomb
https://wrektomb.bandcamp.com