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FILTH
Time To Rot

Me Saco Un Ojo / Rotted Life (2025)
Rating: 8/10

I’ve waited for this for three long years, a debut record from a Swedish death metal band that doesn’t sound like the usual Swedish stuff. Forget HM-2 buzzsaw generic bullshit, Time To Rot is, as the band moniker suggests, utter filth. From its stylishly sick cover art to its gruesome contents, this is an album that wades through gunk and wallows in slop.

This whole soup of decay is the product of Per (vocals and drums), Sebastian (lead guitar and bass) and Ismael (rhythm guitar). Filth bridges gaps between death n’ doom metal, crafting morbid trudges which leak such an ominous concealing fluid, and for 30 minutes the Gothenburg-based band encases the listener in a coffin of clay, dragging the last breathe by way of mid-tempo miasma. Utterly despairing, this release coats the lungs in a gluey ash, ominously existing within its own riff coils and regressive thuds.

The title track is a corpse concoction of churned compost and bone mulch, dismally equipped to suffocate after one horrid spin of its cancerous contours. Maybe throw such an abhorrent project in the same tar pit as Spain’s Sanctuarium, although this peat bog leans more towards one of those evil old school death metal demos of yore. ‘Emaciated’ wastes no time in plunging into its own pungent orifice; riffs grind through layers of mulch and muck as flickers of primordial bluster brood chaos within.

The sepulchral fumes of ‘Decrepit Womb’ and opener ‘Odious Obsession’ squirm languidly as worms within sodden soil. Never a tirade, more of a chest-crushing, anxiety inducing slog spiked with fits of despair. Even by choosing to add a kick to the labour, it’s never anything more than a spasm of dying hope amidst a dense scurry of dampened percussion and miserable bass. That’s not to say that this is one of those torturous affairs, far from it in fact.

Filth doesn’t expose the listener to funeral doom, Time To Rot is very much death metal, but it’s delivered in that abysmal way which makes you feel like your innards have been sucked out of your arsehole. ‘Live In Agony Die In Pain’ festers like a bubbling cesspit. The dank echoes of sordid drums echoing around thick, moss-clung walls as the guitars moan and gnash while at the same time choke on their own fluids. ‘Flesh Dress’ is another gruesome groove, wafting like noxious vapour through the veil of gloom as each well soiled riff permeates the blanket of foul air. Amongst the grot and clots it is indeed, TIIIMMMEE TO ROTTTT!!!!

Neil Arnold

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