(Straight outta Malmö, Sweden, Throne of Roaches released their debut album Chrysalis last month, and today our writer DGR gives it an extensive review… after some extensive thoughts about what’s going on with death metal in the modern era.)
For those who’ve been paying attention to the recent spate of reviews the site has run – and those by yours truly – ever-observant as you are, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve had a recent string of album arts in which the predominant color has been blue. Well enough of that bullshit, it’s time for a change. Now, we’re going with the color green for an album or two.
Every year tends to bring with it some sort of theme – other than usual overarching abject misery – that picks at the brain until it finally unclasps like a louse killed and rots away into dust. This year in particular has been poking the cortex with ideas of how metal has grown and evolved each year, and its myriad changes and how newer groups must navigate a landscape that isn’t just shifting so much as it is turbulent enough that even the FAA these days might detect that there’s something happening with a particular plane before it hits the ground. They don’t have enough coffee in the world to keep that one guy fueled.
Metal has blended many times over its generations and death metal especially has time and time again found itself bisected, dissected, vivisected, septrisected, and intersected to the point of unrecognizability. Pantheons and towers erected and destroyed in one fell swoop and just as many merged together to resemble the security guard cenobite from Hellraiser: Bloodline. What is and isn’t has proven fertile ground for those who wish to engage in perpetual argument. The concept of death of the author becomes hilarious in this regard when dealing with a genre obsessed with the actual physical undertaking and not the philosophical aspect.
A smidgeon of the excitement of discovery comes from viewing how groups navigate the current musical landscape and how their chosen art reflects upon it. The modern era of death metal – obsessed with the cutting edge and forever changing – tends to absorb as much as it burns. This isn’t a perfect equilibrium but although the Earth behind it may be scorched for a decade or two it’s never salted so that nothing grows again. It is partially radioactive at least but some of that may come from many of these groups veering hard into the tech-death sphere or the prefix-core worlds from time to time, and both seem to be on a quest for speed that will eventually achieve time travel.
Or mayhaps, we already have? Because we have now been with the old-school death metal revival for a decade-plus. The revival of the old has in itself gotten old and newer groups nowadays have such a well-established blueprint that they can make both incredibly and deceptively authentic takes on a style intended to be rotten to the core. There are groups with albums these days that sound not so much like a monster within a mountainous cavern waking up and roaring as they do a cavern that itself has woken up and roared. The abyss itself awakening in frustration and yelling at the neighbor to shut the fuck up for once, that it works weekends and a five year old’s party shouldn’t be running until 2:45 in the morning.
Maybe the only thing left for a younger band to do is experiment or blend? That’s the fun part with extremity though — it always makes itself available to serve as a filter to run something through and what pops out on the other side will be ‘extreme’ in some form.
A young band like Throne Of Roaches – founded only two years ago in 2023 – then has a multitude of approaches available for them to take up the shield for or cut their teeth on, filing them into sharpened razors for future musical attempts. Their first full-length Chrysalis sounds a lot like a young project unleashed upon the world, melding as much into one style as they could to form the forty-one-and-a-half minutes of music that could constitute the latest hacksawing and re-stitching of death metal into a new form. Welcome to the Throne Of Roaches redemption tour, which at the very least should make it so they’re not listed as a deathcore band anymore as of this writing.
You’d be forgiven for thinking such after glancing at the group’s logo and album art, but in actuality the chosen visual style is closer to the modern age of tech-death and its many offshoots than the chunkier bruisers of the core scene. Throne Of Roaches aren’t completely immune, and some influence works its way in, but that could be credited just as much to groups like Suffocation and the eventual slam psychotics as it could be assigned with finger-pointing to one region of metal’s hemisphere.
Instead, Throne Of Roaches‘ musical take is closer to a groove-heavy style of death metal crashing into the hair-on-fire pyrotechnics of groups that tend to boil out of the Artisan Era roster. Vacillating between the two, Throne Of Roaches‘ musical adventures on Chrysalis resemble me when presented with a trip to the ice cream buffet at a Vegas restaurant. It’s not a case of ‘what do you want’ but ‘when you will get to it’ because the answer for flavorings is always just a flat ‘yes’. Thirty-one flavors isn’t so much a challenge as it is an invitation.
The jack of all trades approach has its flaws of course, in that Throne Of Roaches spread thin across their many ideas so there’s not quite as much groove as, say, a chunkier act like Black Rabbit or Baest, and they definitely aren’t flying as fast as some of their velocity-worshiping contemporaries. The value of an album like Chrysalis comes from how Thrones Of Roaches tread on a very fine line and remain deceptively difficult to identify – even if they may be unaware of doing so themselves.
Chrysalis weighs in at nine songs, but like many a death metal release these days it’s actually eight tracks and a fairly lengthy intro scene-setter. Those songs are all in the four-to-six minute ballpark so even at eight tracks you still have some fairly beefy material to play with. Not quite roided out to the gills and sweating at the mere thought of actual movement as some songs can get, but still, you can’t argue with songs that have some actual heft behind them.
They’re not eight songs stretching for time either with overcomplicated riff segments or multiple motifs intertwining their way throughout each one. Chrysalis is mostly constructed of songs that know what they want to be within the first forty-five seconds or so, and once that gear has been set, that’s the gear that Throne Of Roaches stay in for most of the song. If a song starts out with a big bludgeoning guitar riff, one heavy enough that the drums following behind it are like a symphony of sledgehammers landing atop your skull, then that is mostly what that particular song is going to be.
What this means in the long run is that if it seems like Throne Of Roaches have opened the playbook to both old school death metal guitar riffing and newer shred styles and are just gleefully launching the pages up into the air and grabbing them per song, then you wouldn’t be too far off. Throne Of Roaches are stradling multiple generational lines within their latest album and it also melds into them taking a jack-of-all-trades approach to the complete oeuvre of the album.
“Infernal Cleansing” does a good job as the sort of first-impression salesman of the album, though it doesn’t pull the complete maneuver of introducing all the building blocks that Throne Of Roaches will be using to construct their house. If anything, you’d think that the group were one among a breed of new high-speed tech-death artists with that opening high shriek, yet the song slowly devolves into something murkier before it closes out.
What it does reveal about much of Chrysalis is just how rhythm-guitar-driven this album is. There’s a light melodic tinge to much of Throne Of Roaches‘ work here, but the rhythm segment rules the day and many of these songs are built out of tried and true headbangers. A song like “The Endless Hunt” following is more sinister in its approach, though it and “Hollow Words” coming next do demonstrate that Throne Of Roaches have a habit of opening each track with a tremendous guitar lead.
That melodic line twists itself around the neck of “The Endless Hunt” more than many of the subsequent songs, but it is one of a handful of approaches that Throne Of Roaches take to music here. “Hollow Words” for instance, is of a similar vein to the album’s opener but seems more content to split the difference between the two before spilling into the much more upfront and confrontational “Where Is Your God?”
“Ashen Sun” later on in Chrysalis is one of the aforementioned heftier numbers, with the guitar gallop straight out of a melodeath playbook, before it settles more into a solid Obituary-esque double-bass roll. While Throne Of Roaches don’t quite have that band’s penchant for sounding like thunder down, it’s hard not to see that group’s latter-era bleeding into the overall lifestream of death metal, reaching across the ocean, and working its way into an opening rhythm section like the one working its way through the crevices within “Ashen Sun” for its verses.
“Life Of Guilt” is the big and monstrous slow song of the album and is the time wherein guitars seem to sustain more of a slam-head-into-wall chug as they make their way through the song. You can hear easily how this one is going to break past its bounds with little effort once you contend with just how the band are going to slow-roar their way through it. The previous four songs leading up to it are all varied takes on death metal in its chystalized, fossilized, and modernized forms. “Life Of Guilt” is the big centerpiece that is going to pry open the gateway for Throne Of Roaches to both travel and experiment within the back half of the album.
Many releases have a fulcrum point upon which an album will tilt, as one side frontloads itself more than the other, and this is one point where Throne Of Roaches are very traditional. The more varied songs, the ones more scattered across the death metal plot, lay in the album’s back half, which is fun considering that the two discussed prior were both early-released singles well ahead of this album. Maybe the songs surrounding them are the musical mutant plants growing out of the crossbred forms nearby.
One of the strengths of an album like Chrysalis is that there is a sincerity and belief to the band’s music that you don’t find too much these days. Whether every segment of a particular song lands or not doesn’t seem to matter as much because Throne Of Roaches are going to throw their whole weight behind it. There’s just as much cutting their teeth into fine points here as there is expert use of an already sharpened blade.
Chrysalis is an enjoyable album for how much Throne Of Roaches throw themselves into it. The death metal parts are as overwhelmingly sinister as the group could make them; the light tech segments where the band let loose from the outright red meat hammering are equally impressive; and yes, the one veering straight off the road and into the guardrail of burly-core chugging that makes up the bulk of “Where Is Your God?” is still a ton of fun anyway, because it arrives at the behest of the three songs prior to it bouncing between a classically-themed death metal style, some hair-on-fire speed, and heavy roars all around.
While Throne Of Roaches don’t quite settle into one particular groove throughout, the wild experimentation they indulge as they realize that the world is their oyster proves to be a lot of fun. Chrysalis may still find Throne Of Roaches growing into their own yet.
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