After guitarist Gjero Krsteski left the German horror/punk band Hellgreaser he founded a new band named Greh in 2022 as a one-man project. After releasing an EP and a single on his own, Greh expanded to a full lineup with the joining of drummer Maurice Müller (Hard Strike, Milan) and vocalist Martin Kocula (Grau).
Now a full band, Greh released their 2023 EP Reversion of the Repressed, and then a trio of singles last year. This year — on January 15th — Fetzner Death Records will release the band’s debut album Dysphoric Devotion. It includes those previous three singles and five more original songs, and we’re bringing all of them to you today.
Fetzner Death presents the album with this introduction:
Dysphoric Devotion is a musical journey through a dark universe in which light and shadow constantly alternate. The result is a world of sound that is characterized by both raw violence and intense rage. The music is a reflection of human existence: full of contradictions, abysses, and an irrepressible longing for redemption.
Immerse yourself in powerful death metal riffs that collide with atmospheric doom passages, while distorted walls of guitars, booming drums and dark vocals create an oppressive atmosphere that will stay with you for a long time.
The eight songs on the new album do include blood-congealing colors of death metal and doom, but Greh‘s musical palette is even more diverse than that.
The album opener “Chained Thoughts,” for example, initially casts a dark and dismal light, but with a scorching shriek it begins to jump, with drums rocking, the bass slugging, and riffs jolting. Abyssal gutturals expel the words in malignant tones, trading off with berserk screams, and the guitars also viciously seethe and miserably whine.
It’s the kind of song that’s a feral and viscerally potent muscle-mover but also sinister, to the point of sounding authentically evil, and it seizes attention immediately — a very effective way of breaking listeners into the album.
From there, Greh move into the hard-hammering and even more frightening title song, a brutishly jarring affair laced with worming and shivering tremolo’d riffage and another spine-tingling and truly terrorizing vocal performance. Before it’s over, as the drums start blasting (one of the very few times that happens on the album), the song features a strangled scream that seems to go on past the limits of human endurance.
Even two songs in, Greh have already brought in elements of pitch-black sludge and black metal, while making clear that a key goal of their songwriting is to beat listeners senseless while scaring the hell out of them. Brutish, battering-ram grooves continue to play a key role as the album expands, as do morbid minor-key melodies that seem to slowly writhe in agony and hopelessly wail.
In their movements, Greh keep the pace variable, slowing down to sink listeners into ghastly moods of oppressiveness and choking despair, and accelerating into frenzies of churning and chewing riffage, thundering low frequencies, and neck-cracking beats. Through it all, those monstrous gutturals (which sometimes sound like a beast gargling bone fragments and viscera), rabid howls, and boiled-in-oil shrieks keep the terror factor in the red zone — especially when they double up.
And while the guitars are coated in corrosive grime, the production as a whole creates separation and clarity, providing pulverizing punch while allowing the guitars to shine through the grit and filth that coats them, and putting those horrid vocals way up front.
Greh don’t drag out their songs. With the exception of the closing track they operate in the 3-4-minute range, but still manage to create variations within those spaces, albeit variations that are all dark — diabolically demented, doomed, and bone-smashing. The closing track, “Enter My Oblivion” pushes all those ingredients again, but adds strings and electronics at the end in a way that’s otherworldly, providing a glimpse of the oblivion into which we’ve been led.
And with that, we invite you to experience the thrills and chills of Greh‘s Dysphoric Devotion for yourselves:
Dysphoric Devotion was recorded and produced by GREH Recordings, and it was mixed and mastered by Hard Drive Sounds in Stuttgart. The album artwork was created by Aaron Bonogofsky.
Dysphoric Devotion is available on digipak CD, cassette tape, and digital formats. Fetzner Death recommends it for fans of: Hexis, Heriot, Nails, Mantar, Thou, Konvent, Conan, YOB, Nightmarer, Predatory Void, Triptykon, Body Void, and Primitive Man.
PRE-ORDER:
https://fetznerdeathrecords.bandcamp.com/album/greh-dysphoric-devotion
FETZNER DEATH:
https://fetznerdeathrecords.de/
GREH:
https://greh.band/
https://www.facebook.com/BandGreh
https://www.instagram.com/greh.metal/