Deathwards have put out The Sore Weight Of Repentance, the second song from Realms of Sin, and it arrives with an unusually long run-up behind it: the Chilean band formed in 2017, put out two demos, and only now reach a first album. It comes on 30 October through Sepulchral Voice Records, on 12 inch vinyl, CD and digitally.
The sound is deliberately placed at the moment death metal was still pulling away from thrash and speed metal in the late eighties. Sharp riffing, vocals that stay at the front and solos nobody reined in, with none of the polish the genre picked up afterwards.
The words go further back than that. Dante's Inferno, the Bible and medieval pictures of damnation supply the frame, and the songs work through lust, greed, wrath, heresy and fraud towards spiritual collapse and judgment. Production was handled at Equinox Studio, and Jorge Olavarria painted the cover in oils by hand, which for a record about circles of punishment is the right amount of effort.