CRYPTWORM

It is a point I'm making on an almost weekly basis, but it still bears repeating: this has been another fantastic year for death metal. And even though we're deep into December, the seemingly never-ending cavalcade of top-quality releases is still ongoing. Another monstrously impressive band from the UK, CRYPTWORM are giving 2023 a particularly gruesome and shit-encrusted final farewell. If last year's "Spewing Mephitic Putridity" was the repulsive, skin-splitting opening salvo, "Oozing Radioactive Vomition" is the eruption of coagulating offal and shattered bone that follows. Joyously unsavory entertainment for the entire family, in other words.

Neck deep in old-school filth, CRYPTWORM belch their songs into the ether, with a slack-jawed brutality that owes a certain debt to AUTOPSY and latter-day loboto-masters like UNDERGANG and CEREBRAL ROT. Not that these grubby-fingered thugs are in any way predictable. These songs slither, lurch and batter with psychotic glee, but there is mischief amid the meathead madness. The title track sneaks some weirdly angular riffs into its heads-down sprint to the abattoir, as tempo shifts add a sprinkle of ingenuity to the Brits' caveman clangor. "Organ Snatcher" is a truly murderous chunk of flayed, old-school flesh, with "Symphonies…"-era CARCASS as a spectral presence and harrowing, slam-worthy riffs that reek of something far weirder than putrefaction. Ushered in by one of the most disgusting bass tones in recent memory, "Miasmatic Foetid Odour" blends frenzied blasting with horrified hooks, punky thrash and the most colossal, slam-friendly grooves this side of KRUELTY.

While the vibe is still unmistakably old school, "Oozing Radioactive Vomition" builds upon the startling swamp-death of their first album and conjures something even uglier and more primitive in the process. Again, CRYPTWORM emanate that same queasy, unsettling vibe that continues to make AUTOPSY such a benchmark for this kind of death metal. On songs like multi-speed sludge-hammer "Necrophagous" and the heroically titled "Engulfed By Gurgling Purge Fluids", they sound lost in the rancid moment and entirely unburdened by expectation. This is death metal at its most deliriously rotten: a bleary-eyed but blistering act of thuggish abandon, executed with a deadpan, virtuoso flourish.

There may be no finer way to end the year than sinking into welcome oblivion with "Submerged Into Vile Repugnance" blasting into your pot-addled ears. Clearly the product of men who have spent a considerable amount of time listening to "Mental Funeral", it takes the putrid, '80s death metal formula and fires a giant, razor-wrapped rocket up its unsuspecting backside. Meanwhile, frontman Tibor Hanyi's vocals are absurdly guttural and inhuman, and yet stoically tethered to the raw, stripped down and stomach-churning way of doing things that seeps from this pernicious power trio's every pore. Another superb death metal record to add to the increasingly ridiculous pile, then.