Master of Alchemy
Mastiff have slightly changed tack with this new album, less influenced by black metal, and more firmly harcore... but there is still a total absence of light and an all pervading nihilism, not to mention the unrestrained rage. Everything Is Ending makes it to my favourite track (pure hardcore), but Worship is a close second (the ghost of Jeff Hanneman haunts on). God-damn dog just tore all the flesh off the bone then pissed on the bloody mess left behind!
Favorite track: Everything is Ending.
Matt
Yeah this is one of the best records of the year. The combination of sludge, hardcore, grit, rawness, heaviness. I could go on and on. A true masterpiece.
Favorite track: Serrated.
Darknight
Mastiff are on a new level of intensified hardcore aimed to wreck our heads and destroy our minds. Get ready for the heaviest record of 2024,prepare thy eardrums for this misery and masterpiece,you will not get your hearing back!!!
Favorite track: Pitiful.
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.
Even for this genre the sheer intensity of this album always manages to floor me. Might not be the most unique album under the sun but it doesn't have to be; the performances are tight and ferocious, the songwriting is dynamic and explosive, the production is crushing, it's just all things to a mathcore fan. napalmsatan
What an impressive piece of black metal. This one-man hurricane is pure art. Sgah‘gahsowáh creates an haunting atmosphere. He puts so much soul in his music. Sælzer Bub
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
A fantastic debut showing from Baltimore metal band Born of Plagues, uniting post-metal's expansive textures with sludge's almighty muck. Bandcamp New & Notable May 19, 2021