GLORIOUS DEPRAVITY – Death Never Sleeps

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  GLORIOUS DEPRAVITY
• Duration: 00:34:02
• Available from: 07/11/2025
• Label:

• Transcending Obscurity

Streaming not yet available

The dress, in some cases, makes the statement. Moreover, a moniker like Glorious Depravity (homage to the Ripping Corpse demo of the same name), an artwork signed by Dan Seagrave, the man who with his paintings indelibly marked the death metal imagery of the Eighties/Nineties, and the involvement in the control room of Joe Cincotta (Obituary, Suffocation) and Ryan Williams (Slayer, The Black Dahlia Murder) create expectations that the content of “Death Never Sleeps” is unlikely to disappoint.
This is, in fact, the case for a record that sees the New York formation – a sort of 'super group' made up of members of Woe, Pyrrhon and Gravesend – reappearing on the market in an even more lucid and ruthless guise than that worn at the time of their debut “Ageless Violence” (2020), once again setting aside any type of discussion linked to the search for a personal sound to enter a derivative and nostalgic, old-school dimension without, however, following beaten paths until the exhaustion from the contemporary revival.

A pool of propulsive, caustic and sharp death metal sounds, in which the technique never takes over the foundations of the songs and where the law of the riff – an essential criterion for the way in which the quintet interprets the genre – reigns supreme over a series of constructs that are neither too linear and ignorant, nor so complex as to lead to avant-garde formulas, evoking from start to finish a sense of explosive impact and ingenuity applied to the process of slaughtering a body.
We therefore find ourselves on the side of the authors of “Dreaming with the Dead”, of the Sinister of “Hate” and “Diabolical Summoning” and of the denser and more structured Floridian school immortalized by works such as “Millennium” and “The Bleeding”; a trend that for some years has been able to revitalize itself thanks to the efforts of Hyperdontia and Skeletal Remains, and which today our band interpret with a taste and authority absolutely worthy of their underground pedigree, suggesting that this should no longer be seen as an impromptu project, but rather as a priority on par with the aforementioned parent bands.

Music in which the thrash component still has the opportunity to resonate – very ferociously – between the peaks and valleys drawn by the guitar work (just listen to the incipit of “Carnage at the Margins”), and stimulating precisely because of its unpredictability without sophistication or excess, the daughter of an era during which one could not ignore synthesis and concreteness to express oneself.
A flow that thrives on meticulous joints and continuous input from a pulsating and dynamic instrumental section, with the bass also carving out its own space in the mix, which while it is true that it does not reinvent the wheel in the slightest (indeed doing everything to underline its traditional aesthetic) never fails to sound fresh and engaging, starting very well on the notes of “Slaughter the Gerontocrats” and continuing on a trail of burning songs and riffs with a capital R.