Horrifier haul Norway’s forgotten death‑metal corpse into a sludge‑soaked blast furnace, resurrecting its roots with their second full length.
HORRIFIER
Norway and Sweden may be defined by black metal and death metal respectively, but both scenes ran far deeper than their more famous exports. While the chain-sawing Swedeath was exploding, Norway fostered its own festering underground – Dark Throne’s (it was two separate words when the band formed) Soulside Journey stood toe‑to‑toe with Sweden’s finest, and Norway’s Cadaver proved the country wasn’t solely breeding corpse‑painted arsonists.
Horrifier tap into that fetid lineage twisting it with the diseased murk of US pioneers such as Autopsy and Incantation. Despite forming in 2022, the band have already churned out six releases, this being their second full‑length. A dive into their earlier output makes it clear they’re hell‑bent on spewing barbaric, stench‑ridden death metal for those who crave the most putrid strain of the genre and they do it with grim efficiency.
COMPELLED TO SLAUGHTER
The weirdly echoing vocal intro of Voices sets the scene for the nightmarish assault that explodes when Compelled To Slaughter starts. Rather than straight up blast beat devastation the song spreads out like a plague, its doom-death pacing and stagnant riffing giving way to an Autopsy styled lurch as the tempo drops to slithering menace. That same malignancy saturates the album as Human Butchery detonates with four snare taps deluging the listener in blast beats and echo tinged atmospheric guttural vocals. Like the opener the song uses doom-death pacing, in injecting a sludge aura and background wails that deepen the creepy torturous atmosphere.
REJOICE, CHILDREN OF THE FLESH
The bone-sawing opening on Rejoice, Children Of The Flesh is gloriously gruesome, its slower tempo smothering the song in insidious dread. In places the song slips into doom metal, offering tuneful guitar work before a shock and awe blast beat obliterates it. Horrifier cram their songs with lurching shifts as the track Body Hoarder tears in with murderous, Incantation‑like velocity before collapsing into a cavernous Coffins‑style crawl, only to unleash a lung‑puncturing riff break near its peak and slam the accelerator down again.
MORBID LUST
Autopsy influences rain down on the opening 20 seconds of Morbid Lust, so strongly it almost feels like a cover, which of course it is not as the track erupts with a detonating blast. Yet it is the slower suffocating sections that truly grip wrapping everything in claustrophobic dread. Case in point is the closer Blood For Ascension which has a doom metal opening and sinister guitar work that creeps around the listener like an encroaching ghoul. The constant changes in tempo keep you on your toes as the addition of double kick thunder produces an unexpected catchiness. As the longest piece it ventures further, shifting into atmospheric doom reminiscent of Morbus Chron.
Horrifier’s second full‑length is a rancid, shape‑shifting testament to Norway’s deeper death‑metal lineage, fusing blast‑ridden violence and doom‑choked dread into one putrid unrelenting vision.
Horrifier: Bandcamp