- Country: USA
- Style: Technical death metal / Deathgrind
- Label: Metal Blade Records
- Release date: 12 May 2023
Dave Otero has now produced four Cattle Decapitation albums in a row, and by this point he knows exactly how to capture Dave McGraw’s blast beats without flattening everything around them. That matters here, because this is dense music. Josh Elmore and Belisario Dimuzio pile technical death metal riffing on top of grind speed, yet the melodic leads that first crept in around Monolith of Inhumanity cut through cleanly, and the low end hits with real weight.
Conceptually it picks up where Death Atlas left off. That album ended with a scorched, lifeless planet; this one imagines what crawls out of the ashes, a mutated “Humanity 2.0” that Travis Ryan compares to cockroaches surviving a nuclear war. Ryan remains the band’s secret weapon, moving from guttural lows to shrieks to the strangled melodic snarl that gives “Solastalgia” its almost anthemic lift.
Criticism? At 52 minutes it demands a lot, and the middle stretch runs together in places. But the closing pair of “Solastalgia” and “Just Another Body” shows a band still pushing its sound forward, and Wes Benscoter’s grotesque cover art fits the music perfectly. The album is dedicated to the late Gabe Serbian, a former member of the band.
Best tracks:
We Eat Our Young
Scourge of the Offspring
Solastalgia
Just Another Body
Author’s rating: 10/10
