DECREPIT ALTAR – Egregious Defilement

vote
6.5

• Bands:
  DECREPIT ALTAR
• Duration: 00:20:44
• Available from: 11/21/2025
• Label:

• Me Saco Un Ojo Records

Streaming not yet available

Promising debut for Decrepit Altar, a young Croatian band that presents itself on the death/doom metal scene with a good mini, entitled “Egregious Defilement”. It is a convincing business card for the Zagreb quartet: three long pieces, for about twenty minutes, dark and heavy at the right point, in line with the trend attributable above all to names such as Disma, Cianide and Anatomia.
So, monolithic and agonizing death/doom metal, with a nice ultra-guttural Craig Pillard-style voice and a production characterized by leaden sounds and full-bodied distortions (the bass tone is phenomenal in this sense).

The recording genesis of this EP saw a first digital diffusion as a self-production in May 2025 and now the vinyl release for the London label Me Saco Un Ojo Records, a company particularly active in proposing titles of valid underground death metal and death/doom projects.
Of course, the Croatian quartet does not invent anything new and literally repeats a well-tested formula made up of slow tempos, oppressive atmospheres and some acceleration of classic death metal, the latter however truly reduced to the bare bones, given that they only appear for a few seconds in the central part of the opening piece “The Festering Depths”. The first song also represents the best manifesto to describe the idea behind Decrepit Altar, because it contains both the most extreme aspects of the doom metal side with even bordering on funeral doom and the more purely death metal side.
The formula does not change in “Beckoning Of The Moss Ridden Tomb” and “Fields Of Flayed Skin”, two further examples of the qualities of Decrepit Altar, who demonstrate that they are absolutely no novices, but know how to structure impactful songs lasting between five and eight minutes in total without falling into monotony. We like the incomprehensible logo, as well as the classic black and white cover with a catacomb setting, which to most may seem like a cliché, but in reality has its own very precise coherence in the economy of the topics covered and the music.

Overall, you should listen to a full-length to better evaluate the real intentions of Decrepit Altar, who for now demonstrate that they know how to do their job well, while showing several points that could be improved: for example, the funeral doom influence could be delved even deeper in order to make the atmosphere even more claustrophobic.
Not only that, an intriguing choice would also be to try to give more push during the pieces, adding more death metal accelerations that look to the godfathers Incantation, otherwise you really risk endlessly repeating the classic pattern of alternations between doom parts and rhythmic parts with the double bass drum that accompanies the dark melodies built by the tremolo riffs.
In summary, there is still something to work on, but the conditions are certainly more than good.