Cannibal Corpse Remains Delightfully Lethal on "Chaos Horrific" (Review + Interview)

Chaos Horrific is the sixteenth record from Cannibal Corpse, a band that started in 1988–the year I was born. Like the cadence of a serial killer’s compulsive violence, Cannibal Corpse has released new music every few years as long as I have been alive. It shouldn’t be possible for an artist to work in the relative confines of a genre like death metal and still be relevant, let alone one of the top acts. How many different ways are there to describe an act of murder while blast beats play? How can Chaos Horrific be any good?

That was rhetorical. The record is great. Better than it has any right to be, honestly. Tight songwriting, impressive technical flourishes, crushing production, and an uncompromising ferocity that bands full of young whippersnappers who know how to TikTok can’t hardly match. Cannibal Corpse’s latest feels familiar and fresh, like visiting home again after a year or two away, catching up with old friends and marking changes in the landscape since the last time you were here. It's a marker of time, a cycle completing before beginning again, like the change of seasons or a new iPhone coming out. 

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Ascribing value to an event like this that reliably repeats is hard. Each time, it’s just a little different. You are just a little different. Reviewing a Cannibal Corpse record is like trying to review a specific birthday.

“So, another Cannibal Corpse record?” I asked Paul Mazurkiewicz, drummer and one of two remaining original members.

“Oh yea, here we are. Here we go!” he says over Zoom and rubs his hands together. There’s a huge cat tree in the background and he’s sitting a little too close to the camera. I met him one time on the Evisceration Plague Tour in 2009, and saw him talking to some fans outside. I yelled “CANNIBAL CORPSE FUCK YEA” at him. He walked across the parking lot and gave me a fist bump, asking if I enjoyed the show. I said I did and felt like the coolest person in the world. 

“If I can do something as little as taking a picture to make someone happy, I’ve done my job,” Mazurkiewicz says when I tell him the story. Cannibal Corpse’s job is to make people happy. And they do. The band’s recent gig at Brooklyn Steel with Mayhem and Gorguts was full of smiling, headbanging faces. Even Corpsegrinder cracked a smile towards the end of the night. “We love being Cannibal Corpse,” Mazurkiewicz says.

Like everybody else, Cannibal Corpse wasn’t able to do much during the height of COVID. The pandemic messed up their decades-long rhythm of write, record, tour, repeat. There was also the bizarre departure of their guitarist of 20+ years, Pat O’Brien in 2018. 

When fans finally got 2021’s Violence Unimagined, the record felt like somewhat of a revitalization after a few duller records in the 2010s. The death metal masters brought longtime friend and producer Erik Rutan (Hate Eternal, ex-Morbid Angel, ex-Ripping Corpse) formally into the fold on guitar after a brief stint filling in for O’Brien. Rutan’s playing style and enthusiasm palpably sharpened the band’s output.

Having worked with the band as a producer since 2006’s Kill, Rutan has ostensibly been another member of the band for 17 years. Mazurkiewicz says no longer leaving Rutan at the studio when they hit the post-pandemic road has been a seamless transition. “It was just meant to be,” Mazurkiewicz says.

Rutan’s pedigree as a songwriter and lyricist is well established in his other projects.  Songs like "Overtorture" from Violence Unimagined and "Frenzied Feeding" from Chaos Horrific are unequivocally Rutan’s: scrambling discordant fretwork, vertebrae-splintering transitions. Rutan’s songs bear his stylistic fingerprint but are still undeniably Cannibal Corpse, incorporating into the band’s catalog just as seamlessly as Jack Owen’s and Pat O’Brien’s legacy contributions.

The rest of the band seems invigorated by this fresh blood as well. Guitarist Rob Barret’s methodical track "Summoned For Sacrifice", its cult dismemberment lyrics penned by Mazurkiewicz, became an instant hit since it was released as a single. Founding bassist Alex Webster’s title track "Chaos Horrific" is simultaneously technically adroit and a bit punky and anthemic, a little different than a typical Cannibal Corpse song, proving the legends can still keep fans guessing at their MO three and a half decades on.

It's hard to imagine in a world where Kardashians wear Cannibal Corpse shirts that the band could still put out a record that both die-hard old school types and folks who may only be starting to collect patches for their battle vest can get into, let alone celebrate as “good.” The band and its fans have one of the strongest bonds in the genre and if Chaos Horrific is any indication, we all have a lot more to look forward to in this new era of Cannibal Corpse.

--Skot Thayer

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Chaos Horrific released September 22nd via Metal Blade Records.