PROFANATION are streaming "Ultra-Noise Warfare" in its entirety, two days ahead of release. The French band's debut album arrives September 25 via Iron Bonehead Productions, and all of it is up now at the Death Metal Promotion YouTube channel.
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Nine songs, twenty-seven minutes. That ratio tells you a good deal before a note is played: this is death metal built at grindcore length, with nothing left in that does not need to be there.
PROFANATION introduced themselves with a mini-album called "Skull Crushing Violence", a title that turned out to be a fair description rather than a boast, and the debut does not walk any of it back. There has been one line-up change since — lead guitarist Kev Desecrator, also of VENEFIXION, left after the record was finished — but he plays on all of it, and nothing here sounds like a band caught mid-transition.
Iron Bonehead's own pitch puts PROFANATION somewhere between HADEZ and NECROVORE, with a strong streak of the grinding, hostile momentum of TERRORIZER and England's DOOM. For sheer physical weight the label reaches further, invoking classic ARCHGOAT and REVENGE run through a Swedish death metal filter, and signs off with the claim that if ANGELCORPSE said exterminate, PROFANATION finish the job. Treat the superlatives as the label's, but the coordinates are honest enough — this is the primitive, crust-adjacent end of death metal rather than anything technical.
Underneath the ad copy sits one genuinely unfashionable decision worth flagging. The record was tracked by people playing, without punch-ins or the grid correction that makes a great deal of modern death metal sound assembled rather than performed. It is audible. The album has a rush to it that survives being played loud, which is more than most records recorded to a click can say.
The best argument for it, though, is not the speed. It is the slow material. "Total Stomp" and "Realm Of The Absolute" both do exactly what their titles advertise, and both land considerably harder than the blasting around them — the sound of a band that understands weight is a matter of restraint as much as tempo.
Tracklisting:
- Servile Rot
- Army Of Dogs
- Nosebleed Razor
- Realm Of The Absolute
- Ultra-Noise Warfare
- Vermin
- Total Stomp
- World Of Pain
- Anti
"Ultra-Noise Warfare" is out September 25 on Iron Bonehead Productions.