Pre-order of Deprecipice. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Purchasable with gift card
releases March 22, 2024
$9.99USD or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Available on a Single 180G Tri Color Vinyl. Colors are Opaque Apple, Opaque Tangerine, and Black.
Limited to 450 copies worldwide.
Stock shipping from the UK.
For EU, US and ROW orders please check the MNRK HEAVY EU webstore as postage prices may be less: mnrkheavy.eu
Includes digital pre-order of Deprecipice.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
shipping out on or around March 22, 2024
edition of 100
£22GBPor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Stock shipping from the UK.
For EU, US and ROW orders please check the MNRK HEAVY EU webstore as postage prices may be less: mnrkheavy.eu
Includes digital pre-order of Deprecipice.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
Everything Mastiff do is in the name of intensity. Since forming amid the misery of Kingston-upon-Hull in 2013, the five-piece have crashed extreme metal, sludge and hardcore together to create the most brutal sonic onslaughts possible. Vocalist Jim Hodge, guitarists James Andrew Lee and Phil Johnson, bassist Daniel Dolby and drummer Michael Shepherd write together in their rehearsal room then record as quickly as they can – all in the name of keeping their music fresh, raw and seething.
Even though they signed to major label MNRK Heavy three years ago, Mastiff’s commitment to blunt-force aggression remains untempered. Their 2021 album, Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth, was described by Blabbermouth’s Dom Lawson as a “horrifying slab of disgust” and “a sustained scream in the face of uncontrollable madness”. Now comes its long-anticipated follow-up: Deprecipice – an album that, somehow, smacks even harder than anything this band have unchained before.
“We’ve gone quite a lot towards a hardcore sound,” says Hodge. “Where the last one was more death metal, this one’s a lot more staccato: a lot more defined, riff-wise.”
“Bite Radius” begins Deprecipice in particularly apoplectic form. There’s no fancy buildup to its attack of hard-edged guitar chords and skull-rattling snares, and that rampage is quickly joined by Hodge’s incensed, mic-distorting snarls. Imagine Mastodon recording music on the most aggravating day of their lives and you begin to understand the impact Mastiff bring.
Deprecipice’s hardcore edge barges in through a series of unrepentant breakdowns, from “Bite Radius” to the cataclysmic drop at the end of “Everything Is Ending”. Afterwards, the scurrying punk drums of “Skin Stripper”, the choking atmosphere of “Cut Throat” (featuring US noise/doom brutes Primitive Man) and the immense wall of guitars during “Serrated” find new ways to make unflinching audial violence feel compelling throughout.
Unlike so many of their extreme metal peers right now, though, Mastiff didn’t source this rejuvenated savagery from the anxieties and frustrations of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the lockdowns ended and real life started to resume in 2021 and 2022, Hodge and Lee noticed the spirits of the world around them lifting. Feelings of trauma and isolation were beginning to enter people’s rear-view mirrors – and it was an overcoming that the duo couldn’t relate to. Lee was mourning the loss of his mother, while Hodge realised he was still grieving over the death of his five-day-old son, Isaac, in 2010.
“The album’s called Deprecipice, and that pretty much sums up where me and James were when we wrote it,” says the singer. “We were both standing back on the edge of a depressive void.”
Deprecipice does everything to convey the raw nature of these emotions. Void, a torrenting standout written by Lee about his mother’s passing, roars: “We’re so close! To the fucking end!” The band even recorded the album – again produced by Joe Clayton in No Studio, Manchester – in the space of a week to keep everything pure.
“You have to keep that primal feeling,” Hodge explains. “I think, if you take too much time, you start to second-guess yourself. We try to be as true to ourselves as we can.”
With Deprecipice, Mastiff have made a magnum opus that bleeds with genuine pain. As earnest as it is ferocious, it’s already an album of the year candidate for a year that’s only just beginning.
This one really goes deep. Tremendously heavy and bleak, yet crushingly groovy as well. You can easily see these guys destroying any venue they'd hit live with this. The heavy hitting slow to mid-tempo tunes are sort of tranceinducing. It's very easy to listen to it multiple times in a row or even get lost in it totally. mourner
The UK four-piece summon the ghosts of metal past to create an unsparing album that's unmistakably contemporary. Bandcamp Album of the Day Jun 30, 2022