Weekly Spotlight, Week 21 / 2025

A week that's out to get you in more ways than one, with attacks coming from Drouth, Blood Monolith, Death Whore and Wounded Touch.

It's a tad more pleasant overground, considering these offerings:

Bury Tomorrow – Will You Haunt Me, With That Same Patience

The Callous Daoboys – I Don't Want To See You In Heaven

Full Of Hell – Broken Sword, Rotten Shield (EP)

Pelican – Flickering Resonance

Sleep Theory – Afterglow

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Drouth – The Teeth Of Time

Genre: Black/death metal

Subjective rating: 4/5

Objective rating: 4.5/5

Country of origin: USA

If you find the black/death combo to have grown a little stale and predictable of late, then allow this album the opportunity to change your mind, 'cause it will. It certainly lands more firmly on the black metal side, which is echoed in the ever so slightly (and intentionally) muddled production. But this is by no means a "trve cvlt" sort of traditional-leaning thing. It has an adventurous and daring spirit to it, like the feeling you get from great epic doom and conceptually solid prog metal, and without borrowing any of the technical tropes. The riffs are more often on the heavy, grinding death metal end rather than the cold and sharp one, and there is real force to the bass. The drum work is active, but easily stands on the engagingly diverse side rather than being overly precise and distracting. A release that deserves a lot of listens to properly take it in. And the album art is simply fantastic.

Highlights: "The Teeth of Time" and "False Grail"

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Blood Monolith – The Calling Of Fire

Genre: Death metal/grindcore

Subjective rating: 4/5

Objective rating: 4/5

Country of origin: USA

This feels like the full force of the primal savagery behind all death metal unleashed, and further boosted by the ferocity of grindcore. Yes, it can be a bit overwhelming at times, but beneath the storm-whipped, turbulent surface grinds a steady wheel, steering the onslaught in a controlled direction. There's an otherness to the tone, and meagre hints of melody that give the whole thing a slightly disconnected, unpredictable feel. If you can cope with the distressing nature of it, you might find it quite refreshing. It's like a touch of industrial, but without the machine-like approach. It's massively heavy, brutal in a non-caricatured way, and impressively constructed.

Highlights: "Prayer to Crom" and "Slaughter Garden".

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Death Whore – Blood Washes Everything Away

Genre: Death metal/crust punk

Subjective rating: 3.5/5

Objective rating: 3.5/5

Country of origin: France

Get ready for some real ear defilement. Death Whore is a French band that dresses crust punk in a thick layer of noise-tinged death metal, and seem poised to shake any stage apart with their monstrous, rumbling low end. The cool thing is that the rhythms are quite easy to follow, so you can headbang, jump and stomp your way through the whole goddamn thing. There's a glimmer of levity beneath the brutality, which makes it all the more engaging, and allows you to accept it for not being all that conceptually fleshed out.

Highlight: "Infernal Terror Machine"

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Wounded Touch – A Vivid Depiction Of Collapse

Genre: Mathcore/metalcore

Subjective rating: 3.5/5

Objective rating: 3.5/5

Country of origin: USA

Wounded Touch bring a confident, refined mix of moderate mathcore and non-melodic metalcore into something that manages to convey emotional depth while for the absolute most part going harsh and heavy. It's rhythmically driven, yet kept from going stale or repetitive by impressively varied and beautifully transitioning drum work. It's light on its feel, going for hardcore-levels of heaviness, with a rewarding complexity to the song structures.  

Highlight: "The Damning Variable"