Artist: Katakomba
Country: Sweden
Label: Majestic Mountain Records
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2025
‘The Second Death’ is Katakomba’s return after the solid self-titled album from 2022. Albeit nothing really spectacular, that debut album was definitely a tasty slab of mildly HM2-buzzsawing Swedish Death Metal. And, frankly, although this new record has been in the works for three years, not much of that initial formula has changed.
Which means that ‘The Second Death’ offers you well-played Swedish Death Metal that reminds of bands like Nominon, Interment and early Centinex. While that consequently also means that Katakomba is not quite the new reinventors of the genre, it’s all solidly put together with enough spicy parts to keep it from becoming all too snoozy. A touch of complexity, enough rhythm changes and some melody here and there; cutting a long story short, this is just another good Death Metal album by these young lads. It may not have the appeal of today’s flashy and trendy bands, but I always prefer this to those lifeless, fashionable, flavour-of-the-day-kind of “Death Metal” bands like Deserted Fear, Entrails, Bodyfarm, Baest or Carnation.
Back in 2022 I called Katakomba’s debut album one of the few decent releases on the Redefining Darkness Records label, but now the band returns for this sophomore album it seems that they have swapped record labels. Honestly, I never heard of Majestic Mountain Records, but it turns out that is specialized in mainly Stoner and Sludge and similar styles, not quite my cup of tea, to say the least. The question is therefore whether Katakomba has done itself a favour by switching from a mediocre label to one that has little connection with (Swedish) Death Metal. Time will tell…
