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PUTRESCENT
Darkness Embraced

Rotted Life (2025)
Rating: 8/10

The promotional band photo I saw of this Los Angeles, California-based band certainly suggested that Putrescent looked the part: the long hair, macho stance, leather jackets and graveyard setting – y’know, that classic death metal image from 1990. Dixie Martinez (vocals and guitar), Francisco Tobar (guitar), Demitree Rivera (bass), Abraham Garcia (drums) certainly have previous experience from bands such as Insineratehymn and Sadistic Slaughter, and this shows on what is a ghastly expression.

Typically gnarly in all aspects of its existence, Darkness Embraced offers plenty of familiar extremity from those fast-paced, chilly winds (‘Sepulchral Desecration’), hammering percussion (‘Darkness Embraced’) and utterly cavernous vocals (‘Spectral Sanctum’). But hell, this is one devastating and apocalyptic debut album; even 2023 EP, Inhuman Infestation, couldn’t have prepared me for such a hellish onslaught.

Now, much of what is delivered is frantic and even generic, but there’s no denying the evil presence of such a record. The drumming on ‘Putrid Piles Of Human Flesh’ is despicably savage, but the whole tirade from the beginning of the album to the climax of closing track ‘Inhuman Infestation’ is a thick, scorching torrent spattered with mould and hellfire.

‘Black Ceremony’ is a hideous seeping wreck that begins as a yawning death-doom chasm leaking those mournful guitar chords through black waterfalls of slime. The track maintains its low level churning for some time before the cracks widen and out rush teeming tides of blasphemy. The vocals rumble and moan like foul subterranean tremors, summed up even more so on the morbid oozing of ‘Obscure Putrescent Growls Of Death’ which spews up some hideous, dragging mid-paced riffage.

Yeah, you could say that a lot of contemporary death metal sounds like this – dismal, blustery and vile – but somehow Putrescent just has the right ingredients. The end result is a monstrous and miasmic slab which smothers you like a damp blanket.

Neil Arnold

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