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NECROTUM
Soul Chamber Harvest

Dan’s Crypt (2025)
Rating: 7/10

With their fourth full-length studio offering in five years, Romanian deathsters Necrotum clog the nostrils with their underground scent on this collection of re-recorded and re-imagined songs from the band’s May The Dead Rise demo and Condemned To Burn debut album (both originally released in 2020). A new drummer, Yunus Emre, is in tow, and appears alongside lead guitarist Robert Brezean and vocalist, rhythm guitarist and bassist Filip Garlonta.

Certainly less jagged than last year’s more technical Defleshed Exhumation album, Soul Chamber Harvest won me over immediately with the morbid thud of ‘Locked Inside A Coffin’. Dredged straight from the Autopsy lake of doom, ‘Locked…’ is that mundane yet miserable track that lingers on the skin like cemetery fog. It got to a point where the despairing chimes of the song were on such heavy rotation that I couldn’t fully appreciate the rest of the album. But now, after approximately 12 listens, Soul Chamber Harvest is very much in my bloodstream.

If you like late 80s and early 90s death metal, then I suggest you inhale this one. Built upon the bony rattles of Emre’s drums, particularly the tracks ‘Reborn In Flames’ and ‘Fading Salvation’, and the fluid yet jabbing bass lines, all the songs here exhibit such a macabre aura, swirling as distasteful vapours and sinister sea frets. Even with the aggressive blasts – and there are many (‘Reconquered Domain’) – there’s a gloomy coating to every passage, the bass grinding like an old cart load of bones on a mist-choked cobbled street.

With the previous opus nodding toward the likes of Nile and Suffocation, Soul Chamber Harvest instead regresses, finding great delight in an almost no frills venture that mixes both aggression and gloom (‘Afterlife Torment’). Necrotum remains such an underrated force in their chosen field and skinsman Emre is such a positive addition to their sound, thudding away like a caveman on the morbidly executed death thrasher ‘Internal Scream’. To an extent this outing is a bit of an all-rounder and one which I recommend to anyone who likes understated underground death metal.

Neil Arnold

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