Artist: Degraved
Country: USA
Label: Grip Of Darkness
Formats: Demo Tape
Year: 2025
Admittedly, I wasn’t overly impressed with Degraved’s first two outings, the ‘Exhumed Remnants’-demo from 2020 and the ‘Whispered Morbidity’ EP from 2023. Although both saw releases through revered labels such as Gurgling Gore, Me Sacco Un Ojo, Unholy Domain Records and Chaos, I thought the Death Metal on offer was rather generic and interchangeable with hundreds of other bands playing the same murky sounding “cavernous” Death Metal. Not quite the worst out there, but they were certainly not able to pull anything off that was memorable enough.
Maybe that’s why the split cassette EP with Cystic from early 2024 stayed largely under my radar, at least I didn’t really feel like checking it out because time is always too short anyway. Regardless, I did up ending listening to the band’s new 3-track (rehearsal) demo tape, released by (the band’s own?) Grip Of Darkness label.
While apparently not much has changed in Degraved’s musical palette, this demo is by far the best the band came up with. It is all still about murky, swampy and stomping Death Metal, and honestly, it still hasn’t got much of an own identity. Yet, the rawer sound of these demo/rehearsal tracks is definitely more fitting to savage pummeling that these three songs offer. Especially on the last track, ‘Vacuous State’ the sound is far more gnarly and ragged giving the music a feeling like as if Mortician and Nunslaughter are caught up in a jam session.
I am aware that everything is bound by personal taste and frames of reference, so it is highly likely that many will not agree, but I truly feel that this more primal mould fits the band best. It doesn’t only give the music much more of a raw Death Metal punch, it also allows the band to sound at least a bit different from the pact. This demo is meant as an appetizer of a full-length album that is in the works, but I would strongly advice the band to stick to his more pure and spontaneous sound instead of going back to walls of unidentifiable and generic noise.
