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Universal Heat Death: Cosmic Putrefaction's "The Ancient Demagogue"

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Deep down there somewhere in death metal’s voracious bowels lives a creature so vile and pestilent that its emergence to the outside world just seems, well, unfitting. While Earth is indeed already fucked — whether a mere floating rock or humanity’s only home, we’ve done irreparable damage on all levels, and society seems to be standing on its last leg anyway — we still do have sunny days, cheery neighbors, the goodwill of love, etc. to keep us all moving forward somehow. There are two ways of looking at this, though: 1) our efforts to save ourselves (on any level) are a testament to our unbreakable human spirits and the power of positivity, 2) these efforts are utterly futile and in complete vain, i.e. we’re doomed no matter what. Hope is either everything, or it is a lie unto itself, the worst kind of lie of them all.

So, guess where new underground death metal supergroup Cosmic Putrefaction finds itself with its debut full-length At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm — listen to an exclusive premiere of the album’s first single “The Ancient Demagogue” below.

Cosmic Putrefaction comprises multi-instrumentalist G.G. with guest stars Brendan Sloan (Convulsing) tackling main vocals and XN (Hadit) rounding out At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm with his own hellbound vocal performance on the fourth track. As “The Ancient Demagogue” showcases, the G.G./Sloan duo meshes with unusual aplomb and ferocity: from G.G.’s boundless and mind-melting riffage to Sloan’s horrific barks, this is death metal both deconstructed and reconstructed. The musicianship/technicality is present for sure, but embedded behind the album’s dark ethos and raunchy grit, not distracting anyone from death metal’s profound emotional potential made real right here.

The nine songs on At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm are pithy and punchy. There are moments of silence and retreat strewn across the album, too, but they’re appropriately short-lived, functioning more as brain buffers than anything else. The level of saturation G.G., Sloan, and XN achieve with this album is undeniably impressive considering that At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm coheres exceptionally well both to experimental trends in death metal as well as tried-and-true tropes. Neither polished nor forcibly rough, too, this death metal actually strikes a delicate and subtle balance in its sound, which is impressive for a band with such dizzying levels of brutality. Cosmic Putrefaction is modern death metal done right: timelessly bleak, existentially hopeless, and utterly compromising, locked up forever in the banality of mere vibrations in the air but made real by our doomed minds.

At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm releases April 19th via I, Voidhanger Records, with a cassette release by Caligari Records. Below is a statement from G.G. regarding the new album:

cosmic putrefaction

“At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm” is a release that partially comes from the past. When I was a teenager I had a death metal band called Oaken/Throne, but for some reasons that release has never seen the light. When I begun working on “At the Threshold” I initially thought to bring some of those old tracks back to life and to release an EP, but since I was very angry and inspired I decide to deeply re-arrange the selected tracks and to write some brand new songs to make it a full length concept. Lyrically speaking, the meaning of the concept is the story of a huge ouroboros of a pre-mortem experience narrated through a grand cosmic metaphor every song is referring to in different ways. I’ve never felt so nihilistic and hopeless in any release or project of mine (and generally speaking in my entire life), in other words.

I recorded everything between September and December [2018], I finished the writing process while I was recording, so that period has been pretty much intense for me. When I started working on the record I wasn’t able to perform death metal vocals, and so Brendan Sloan (Convulsing) and lately a close friend of mine, Matteo Casu (XN, from the band Hadit) proposed to fill that duty. While they were recording I trained myself and ultimately I found out that I can sing too, so I made some additional vocals too. Because of that I think that I’ll fill that duty more by myself in future, even if I’m always open to collaborate with guests. Anyway, they both made a great job in my opinion and I’m grateful to them, since they are both talented vocalists and musicians even if in different ways.

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