UMBILICUS, Featuring CANNIBAL CORPSE And DEICIDE Members, Announces New EP 'Ambiguous'

Florida-based classic hard rockers UMBILICUS will release a new EP, "Ambiguous", on November 20, 2026 via Listenable Insanity Records. The band, which features well-known death metal musicians Paul Mazurkiewicz (CANNIBAL CORPSE, HEAVENS GATE) and Taylor Nordberg (DEICIDE, INHUMAN CONDITION) alongside Vernon Blake (ex-NAPALM DEATH live, ANARCHUS) and vocalist Brian Stephenson (ex-ANNIHILATOR/SKULL FIST live),has produced five new songs showing off the group's dynamic range.

The first single comes in the form of "Take Off", an up-tempo rocker featuring soaring vocals and guitar work, backed by a churning freight-train rhythm section.

Mazurkiewicz shares his excitement for the new release: "We are back with five new songs that really exemplify the growth of the band! It's exciting to finally unleash these gems upon the universe and we hope everyone has as much fun listening to these sonic beauties as we did creating them."

The quartet's sophomore offering will be available on 12-inch vinyl and digital platforms.

Pre-order now at umbilicusband.bandcamp.com.

"Ambiguous" track listing:

01. Take Off
02. Lord Stormbrew
03. Prelude: Eternity
04. Winter's Warmth
05. Magus Stellarum

"Ambiguous" was recorded, mixed and mastered by Taylor Nordberg and Jeramie Kling at Smoke & Mirrors Productions in Spring Hill, Florida.

UMBILICUS is:

Brian Stephenson - Vocals
Paul Mazurkiewicz - Drums
Vernon Blake - Bass
Taylor Nordberg - Guitar

In a 2022 interview with Metal Plague, Paul stated about UMBILICUS: "It's a rock 'n' roll project, a hard rock project… It's just a great project that I'm involved with, with great guys.

"I'm passionate about rock 'n' roll music and hard rock and music from the '70s and all that. That is what this is. I'm in the band with Taylor Nordberg, who recently just joined DEICIDE on guitar, and he's in INHUMAN CONDITION and THE ABSENCE. He's the guitar player. A good friend of ours, Vernon Blake, is playing bass. He's one of my best friends and he actually filled in for Shane [Embury] on a NAPALM DEATH tour in the States a few years ago. We have an amazing vocalist named Brian Stephenson from Canada and he's an incredible vocalist.

"It's pure rock 'n' roll," Paul explained. "If people hear this and they're gonna be expecting it to be anything like CANNIBAL CORPSE, it's nothing like it. It's pure rock 'n' roll with great vocals, great songs, great riffing, and we are very proud of it."

Regarding how UMBILICUS got started, Paul said: "To give you a little backstory, it was around 2000 or 2001 and Jack Owen was still in the band with CANNIBAL CORPSE. Me and him have been fans of this music forever. It's embedded and it's my passion and Jack's passion was that as well. I remember it was about 2000 that we said, 'Let's start a project like this,' just to break up the monotony of CANNIBAL and do something different and do something that we love to do as well. Along with the bass player that's in UMBILICUS, we started this project about 20 years ago. We wrote about 15 originals and actually played two shows in Tampa here in a small bar, but we never did anything with the music. We made a couple demo tapes, but we never put it out to the masses, we never made a proper CD. We were always kind of lacking in a good vocalist or a vocalist that we felt was an interpretation of what we were looking for and, inevitably, the band fell apart. We were together for maybe two years and then we went our own ways. Jack ended up forming a different rock band and of course he left CANNIBAL about two years after that. This project just fell by the wayside.

"The bass player Vernon Blake is a good friend of mine, and we always talked about revisiting the project over the years, but Jack didn't want to do it anymore and I was busy with CANNIBAL so it never really came up. So after we finished recording 'Violence Unimagined', then that's when reality was setting in of not touring for a while and for CANNIBAL to be slightly idle for more months than we normally would be. I remember telling my buddy Vern that I'd love to revisit the project and get it going again. We had the time, so why not? You only live once and we're getting older here so we can't wait another 20 years. Well, we could but we'll all be in our 70s, which maybe isn't gonna be a great thing to be doing! I was, like, 'Let's do this.' I got together with Vern and we started playing some of the old songs that we wrote with Jack. I got ahold of Jack— he doesn't live in Florida; he lives in Illinois now, and he didn't seem to have an interest to revisit it, so we said, 'Let's get a new guitar player.' We brought in Taylor Nordberg. He lives in Florida here and we went through some friends and they said that he might be interested. We had Taylor come out and we had him learn some of these old songs that we have lying around that Jack was a part of. He learned a couple and said that he loved this stuff. We practiced for a few times and he said he's in, so basically the band was formed with us three. We decided to drop the songs we had from 20 years ago and just concentrated on new material that Taylor was writing and that we would all write together. The timing worked perfect because of the time off from CANNIBAL and my love of wanting to redo it again and Vern's love of it too. Taylor, luckily, has that same passion for this old school rock 'n' roll stuff as well and it all worked out. We wrote 10 songs that I think are really incredible rock tunes and then we brought in Brian Stephenson. Taylor knew him from a previous band and Brian sang over these songs, and we were blown away by it, and here we are. I think it was well worth the wait of doing this properly and making sure the songs are what they need to be and getting everything prepared for this moment."

Band photography by Deidra Kling