Beats and yelling: Sepculrum

Sepulcrum: Lacerator
Out 24^th July on Chaos Records

Chile’s Sepulcrum land the second album with ease, delivering a near perfect elaboration on 2023’s ‘Lamentations of Immolated Souls’ without over stretching themselves. If anything they are an even more efficient beast than before, expanding their expressive range whilst keeping the runtime to a crisp thirty six minutes that somehow feels like a much meatier experience, such is the ease with which Sepulcrum traverse across moods and styles.

As with much Chilean death and thrash metal, the core thesis is not to ape old school death metal but to update it, to be guided by their influences without allowing them to dictate terms. Early Morbid Angel and Vader are perhaps the most obvious wellsprings here, but this is merely the equivalent of selecting a font to write with, the words are Sepulcrum’s own as they guide us through a menagerie of riff tessellation, a labyrinthine world of twisting corners and steep inclines.

The production remains largely unchanged since the debut. The guitar tone is slightly chunkier; there are fewer mechanistically rough edges, allowing for a more direct death/thrash tone. Bass adopts a mid-range, metallic jangle which allows for full articulation of the often complex basslines (not to mention an elaborate bass solo on ‘The Seven Gates’), leaving the kick drums to flesh out the low end with some much needed girth. The remainder of the drumkit cuts through with ease, providing ancillary power to the dominant guitar tone. Vocals stick with an older iteration of the death growl that feels very Tampa oriented.

And the Tampa mould is very much where Supulcrum sit, with elements of Monstrosity and Malevolent Creation amongst other Morrisound alumni cropping up across this album. A stark reiteration of early technical death metal before it was known as such along with some latent thrash elements lurking in the wings. The music gallops through dense percussive blasts of atonality before zooming in to paint in the details of dark melodic contours, easy to miss due to the sheer speed at which they are delivered. As pieces progress space is made for a more opulent melodic character to emerge. The combative barrage gives way to slower tempos as the music opens out and lead work runs through a series of exchanges between guitar and bass. This bulks out the music with a sense of gravitas whilst simultaneously creating tension as events seem to stretch and contort in painful oscillations.

Sepculrum have done the leg work in crafting a work contiguous with their debut – and indeed the larger spirit of Chilean death metal – whilst offering a broad expansion on what they are capable of. They swagger through themes, moods, and styles whilst remaining true to the core principles of their brand of death metal. In this sense they gesture toward one possible future for death metal (and perhaps metal at large), a kind of folk like development as techniques and mores are handed down and passed between locales, finding distinct developments in different parts of the world. A gradualist evolution anchoring the listener in the familiar whilst offering imaginative deviations to consider, unlike the dense, revolutionary changes that unfurled towards the end of the 80s through to the mid-90s.