(written by Islander)
At least on the global stage, our sense is that the Armenian extreme metal scene has gone relatively unnoticed. And that includes our own site: We try hard to look beyond the usual landscapes of North American and Western European extremity, but a search of our posts reveals that in our 15+ years of existence we’ve only written about seven Armenian metal bands — ARTE-X, Eternally Scarred, Ildaruni, Basturma, Garhelenth, Temple of Demigod, and Dogma. That’s probably more often than many sites devoted in whole or in part to extreme metal, but it’s still a number dwarfed by our coverage of music from many other locales.
In the case of Armenian metal, ignorance is not bliss, because even the relatively small sampling across our own pages reveals a lot of talent. And today we have another case in point — the eighth time we’ve written about an Armenian band, and this time it’s the gnarly and galvanizing death metal quartet Exileth.
This band is a pretty new one, having come together in the capital city of Yerevan only in the summer of 2023, but they’ve wasted no time, playing more than a dozen shows from then until the end of 2024, including the first three-day Satanath Records Music Fest 2024, performing in Batumi, Tbilisi, and Yerevan. In the spring of last year they released a self-titled demo, and on March 1st their debut album Death Of The Almighty will come out via the afore-mentioned Satanath Records and the Italy-based label Wine and Fog Productions.
A pretty new band, but pretty devoted to old-school sounds, drawing inspiration from the likes of Rottrevore and Wombbath, but also Morbid Saint and Merciless. We’ve got some very impressive evidence of this for you in our premiere of the new album’s title track.
What Exileth give us in this song is an outbreak of cruelty and cataclysm, wielding armaments that include murky, menacing, and maddened riffage, driven by snapping snare-work with a sharp pop that contrasts with the moldy fuzz which coats the riffing.
Those riffs gruesomely heave and lurch, and erupt in grisly swarms and wild frenzies, but also lock into cold-blooded head-moving jolts. Even more gruesome are the malignant, belly-deep gutturals that grunt and vomit the words, but the vocals also change, flaring into lycanthropic howls augmented by the echoes of shrill, freakish soloing.
The music is not only savage but also pestilential and supernatural in its atmosphere. At times it sounds dismal and anguished, or oppressive and cruel, as well as berserk, but always authentically evil. And the drumming is relentlessly jaw-dropping to behold — and easy to behold because the tones are so sharply defined within the murk and the malice of what surrounds them.
EXILETH is:
Bagrat Sargsyan – vocals, rhythm guitar
Ruben Yerkanyan – lead guitar
Petros Petrosyan – bass
Hrach Broutian – drums
Death Of The Almighty contains 5 re-recorded tracks from the band’s debut demo 5 new tracks demonstrating their shift toward heavier sounds. Satanath and Wine and Fog will release it in a jewel-box CD edition with an 8-page booklet (limited to 500 copies), and digitally.
Check out the links below for more info, and also give a listen to the first single off the album, “Burned Alive.”
PRE-ORDER:
https://satanath.bandcamp.com/album/sat384-exileth-death-of-the-almighty-2025
Wine and Fog: carelloezio@gmail.com
https://www.instagram.com/wine.and.fog/
EXILETH:
https://exileth.bandcamp.com/album/exileth
https://www.instagram.com/exilethband