Seventeen years after the release of their final album, Swansong – a record that garnered an equivocal response from the band’s fanbase – the news that Jeff Walker and Bill Steer had decided to reconvene their offal-drenched alma mater and make a follow-up was met with a mixture of feverish excitement and trepidation.īut we needn’t have worried. Whether you worship at the altar of death metal, metalcore or grind, few bands are more worthy of laudation than Carcass. Ultimately, though, this was a defiant storm of unapologetic old-school metal spirit, delivered with supreme snottiness and energy levels fit to blow Hell’s fuse box.īuy a copy on Amazon 49. Harder, heavier and more cohesive than their Manifest Decimation debut, Nightmare Logic was precise and snappy enough to win over hardcore fans too.
Power Trip eschewed the knucklehead party-thrash vibes of many retrogressive thrash mobs in favour of raw, demonic and blistering underground thrash that owed a huge debt to the early works of Slayer and Kreator, while still managing to sound like a 21st-century concern.Ī few nods to the early Swedish death metal scene were discernible within the breakneck nastiness of opener Soul Sacrifice and first single Firing Squad, but Power Trip were gleefully smashing boxes before anyone could start ticking them. The fact that young bands were still exploring the multifarious delights of thrash fucking metal in 2017 – three decades on from the genre’s hazy inception – spoke volumes about the enduring appeal of speed, aggression and not giving a shit.