The Cuban death metal band Combat Noise first emerged in 1995 in La Habana, inspired by both Floridian death metal and a desire to render tales of war through their music. Beginning in 1996 they steadily released a sequence of demos, an EP, and eventually three full-length albums, with the last of those appearing in 2013.
There then followed a decade-long hiatus in recordings, a gap that will now end with To the Heart of Battle, a new album set for co-release by Satanath Records (Georgia) and Sanatorio Records (Costa Rica) on May 21st. Today we premiere one of its 12 anthems of war, a song entitled “Stalingrad in Blood“.
The thematic focus of the new album is the Eastern Front of Europe during World War II, the site of horrific battles and stupendous loss of life. Fittingly, the album ends with a cover of “World Eater” by Bolt Thrower, a band who has also clearly influenced the music of Combat Noise.
The focus of the album’s musical episodes is the foot soldier as the main protagonist, “showing his courage, honour and combat skills but also his fears, mistakes and excesses”.
In a nutshell, the song we’re presenting today is an electrifying musical rendition of violence and brute-force destruction, of mayhem and madness, of terror and agony. In creating that experience, the music is also vividly dynamic and notably elaborate.
In the opening two stanzas of this fearsome war poem the snare keeps time like a muscle-moving metronome while the guitars swarm in a dense and vicious mass and the bass heavily rumbles like a tank attack, and then the music detonates like rhythmically-attuned bombs while a guitar quivers and screams. Through it all, the words come out in brutal gutturals.
But as noted, the music eventually begins morphing through different phases. The guitars wail and moan and then ignite in a paroxysm of insanity, with drums blasting like overheating machine-gun fire. The music also blares in pain, and a white-hot solo drives the song to a zenith of blood-spraying insanity.
And at about the 3:00 mark, make sure your neck is loose and ready to move, as the band then lock into a humongous pile-driving groove that drives the song to its end, with guitars writhing and moaning and harrowing voices yelling — and actual machine-gun fire spraying bullets across the channels.
COMBAT NOISE is:
JC Torrente – vocals
Jorge L. “Colo” Reyes – guitars
Yanio Lee – guitars
Vaniet Gil – bass
Pedro Cruz – drums
Satanath and Sanatorio will release the album on CD and digital formats (featuring cover art by artwork by JC Torrente) and they strongly recommend it for fans of the early Cannibal Corpse albums, Bolt Thrower, Just Before Dawn, Asphyx, Panzerchrist, Marduk, and Hail of Bullets.
For more info, check out the links below. We’re also then including a stream of the previously released album track “Partisan“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://satanath.bandcamp.com/album/sat376-combat-noise-to-the-heart-of-the-battle-2024
https://www.instagram.com/sanatorio.records
https://www.facebook.com/phtisis
COMBAT NOISE:
https://www.facebook.com/combatnoise/