As you can see, we’re about to bring you another premiere. As you can see, it’s from a record with an out-of-the-ordinary piece of cover art, especially for a slab of monstrous death metal. So let’s start with that artwork.

Obviously, it looks like a comic book cover — a strange one, to be sure, with an attractive young woman swaddling a Lovecraftian nightmare spawn, and some other inhuman figures in the corner presiding over the torching of a church. There’s a tiny logo in the other corner with “HM-2” in the center. And then there’s the comic’s date: April 02 1973. What is the significance of that?

Well, it turns out to be a tribute to the late Leif Cuzner, who was born on that day. A bassist and guitarist for the enormously influential Swedish band Nihilist, he is widely credited as the inventor of the legendary “buzzsaw” guitar sound, created by turning up all the knobs on his Boss HM-2 distortion pedal to the maximum.

Paying attention to all the clues in the unusual cover art tells you many useful things about the record itself, which is the debut album of the Filipino death metal band Punebre. Entitled Ang Nasa Dako Paroon, it will be released on May 15th by the Mexican label Death in Pieces Records. But through our premiere of the album track “Hele Hele” we have an even better clue. Continue reading »