BEST OF BRITISH: BARSHASKETH / GRIEF RITUAL / MUTAGENIC HOST

(Andy Synn once more sets out to share a few of his favourite home-grown exports)

My main hope, for all of these “Best of British” articles, is that they encourage people to check out some of the grass-roots talent from this dark, Satanic isle that they might otherwise have overlooked.

After all, I know from bitter, personal experience how hard it can be to break through and get yourselves noticed when there’s so many other bands vying for attention and exposure at the same time.

Not, it must be said, that this seems to be an issue for any of the bands in today’s piece – Barshasketh are one of the most respected bands in the UK Black Metal Scene, Grief Ritual have played multiple festivals and are about to release their much-hyped debut album on Church Road Records, and Mutagenic Host have already been pegged by some as the “next big thing” in British Death Metal – but hopefully this article can still play a role in bringing them all to an even wider audience.

BARSHASKETH – ANTINOMIAN ASCETICISM

New Zealander by birth… Scottish by choice… and Black Metal by nature… Barshasketh have, as I’ve already stated, long-since established themselves as one of the most prominent and celebrated names to have taken root in the ever-fertile British Black Metal scene.

And while they’ve yet to achieve the same level of exposure or acclaim in the wider Black Metal world (which, to be clear, doesn’t mean that they’re total unknowns, merely that they deserve far more attention than they’ve been getting) their 2019 self-titled album – which served as something of a rebirth for the band – definitely put their name on a few more lips, and their impressive (albeit imperfect) follow-up will surely do the same.

At its best Antinomian Asceticism recalls the multi-layered black magic of bands like Dark Fortress and Gevurah, with the first four tracks in particular melding punishing power (opener “Radiant Aperture” will absolutely take your face off if you’re standing too close to the speakers when it kicks in) and seething technicality (the guitar work in “Nitimur in Vetitum” is particularly electrifying) with an increasingly moody and menacingly palpable sense of presence (with the subtly, and surprisingly, intricate bass and drum work during parts of “Lebenswelt Below” and “Charnel Quietism” playing a major role in this) as well as a willingness to incorporate some increasingly proggy touches (such as the striking splashes of clean-sung melody, equal parts haunting and hypnotic, found at key points) which serve to expand the album’s creative palette as it goes on.

And while the album may lose some of its early momentum going into its back-half – I’m not really sure that the instrumental strains of “Phaneron Engulf” really add much to the proceedings, or that the tumultuous title-track really needs to be over seven minutes long, and it’s a shame that the initial promise of “Exultation of Ceaseless Defiance” ultimately builds to a rather anticlimactic end – there’s still more than enough creativity and catharsis to be found here to ensure that Barshasketh will surely continue to make a name for themselves with this one.

GRIEF RITUAL – COLLAPSE

If, like me, you enjoyed Grief Ritual‘s debut EP, Spiritual Disease, back in 2022 then chances are you’re going to enjoy their absolutely crushing (and aptly-named) first full-length album, Collapse.

That being said, Collapse isn’t just an extended version of their EP (the more “blackened” and sludgier touches have been pared back to the bare minimum, for one thing) it’s a much more singularly focussed piece of work, one which fixates more on the hardest-hitting Hardcore/Deathcore moments from their debut – all henched-up riffs and beefed-up breakdowns, accented with some subtle touches of gloomy atmosphere (which is pretty much the only subtle thing about this album) – to produce one massively heavy slab of metallic muscle which should very much appeal to fans of bands like The Acacia Strain, Black Tongue, and Underneath.

Sure, there’s the occasional moment which doesn’t work quite as well as you might hope – the otherwise killer “Collapse”, for example, is slightly hamstrung by some ill-fitting and slightly over-earnest spoken word vocals which rob the subsequent drop of some of its impact (although, despite the fact that the band noticeably employ a very similar trick three times in a row, it works pretty much perfectly in merciless mid-album highlight “Fault”, even if “Artifice” also misses the mark a little) – but don’t let a few minor criticisms convince you that I don’t like this record (it is, in fact, my favourite of the bunch).

After all, there’s just so much to love here, from a band whose pure musical muscle is more than matched by the unwavering strength of their convictions (the nerve-shredding, yet eerily melodic, “Gnaw”, for example, is absolutely unequivocal in its support for Trans rights, while the caustic strains of “Calcify” serve as a fittingly brutal backdrop for a visceral lyrical assault on the entrenched systems of suffering and exploitation which continue to hold so many in their sway), but who also aren’t afraid to simply crank up the riffage (“Recursion”) or go straight for the throat (“Bile”) in order to deliver their sonic payload with maximum intensity.

At the same time, however, those subtle atmospheric embellishments I previously mentioned – which you can hear most prominently during the staccato sturm und drang of “Swine” (which reminds me, in part, of much-missed Mancunian nihilists Leeched) and the slow-motion apocalypse of “Marrow” – suggest that Grief Ritual still haven’t finished evolving… and if this isn’t their final form then who knows how much heavier they might become in the future!

MUTAGENIC HOST – THE DISEASED MACHINE

From the moment that opener “Neurological Necrosis” stomps (and I do mean stomps) its foot down on the accelerator you can tell just why Mutagenic Host have been identified as one of the bands to watch in the UK Death Metal scene going forwards.

Dealing in a blend of seriously ugly, Obituary-meets-Autopsy style riffage – all chunky, churning torrents of meat and gristle interspersed with sudden bursts of savage speed – topped off with what sounds to me like a dash of Demilich‘s weirdly angular melodic menace, it’s not so much that Mutagenic Host do anything massively new with the vital building blocks of “Old School” Death Metal but that, like similarly/relatively fresh new faces on the scene like Tribal Gaze, Phenocryst, and Swelling Repulsion, they’ve managed to add a fresh new coat of paint, and a few necessary updates/upgrades, to bring the whole thing up to code.

To be clear, I’m not sure that MH are quite on the same level as the latter three bands (all of whom are established favourites here at NCS HQ) but the potential is absolutely there, especially with tracks like hook-heavy early highlight “Genestealer” and the similarly attention-grabbing, chug-happy hammering of “The Twisted Helix” helping make the album’s opening triptych an absolutely monstrous statement of intent (and an impressive showcase for the band’s many talents, with the twisted leads of Jack Thompson and Sami Tuohino being particularly worthy of praise, as is the impressively tight and taut drum work of George Kinsella-Pearn).

I’ll grant you that, over the course of forty-one-ish minutes some tracks can appear a little more familiar/formulaic than others (though the decision to break up the ongoing assault with a moody mid-album interlude and then to close things with a purely instrumental track does help shake things up a bit, even if “Rivers of Grief” could probably have done with going even bigger to really enhance its impact) but killer cuts like the irresistibly infections “Organometallic Assimilation” (probably my favourite song on the entire album), the brutish, low-end bludgeoning of “Incomprehensible Methods of Slaughter” (which wouldn’t sound out of place on the next Tribal Gaze album) and punishing penultimate track “Promethean Dusk” suggest to me that Mutagenic Host have a very bright future ahead of them… assuming that AI doesn’t kill us all first.