It’s no coincidence, I suspect, that Brit metallers De Profundis have come up with their most downright enjoyable album at the same time as they’ve stripped a lot of the progressive elements away from their sound, leaving more or less a straight-ahead traditional death metal hulk in it’s place that comes close at times to absolutely destroying everything it comes in contact with. Never before has this band sounded simultaneously so dangerous yet accessible as it does on the blistering Embrace Dystopia.

Simplification needn’t mean dumbing down, however; Steve Woodcock‘s tar-black bass still bubbles to the surface in best prog-death fashion all over the place, and the sing-song, almost nursery rhyme nature of the guitar cadences that creep, spider like, through the mid section of Weaponised Rape are both factors that still point to there being a whole lot of thought and superior technique behind The Corruption of Virtue. But when the band decides to simply go for the throat – Desecration of Innocence being a good example – then the stand alone madness, stripped of artifice or flummery of any kind, is really rather a joy to behold.

Of course to boil your art down to something that approaches quintessence without surrendering the ‘impact’ is a trick in itself; luckily guitarists Shoi Sen and Paul Nazarkardeh are up to the task, bringing the dissonance and the mellifluosity in almost equal measure – their work on closing track The Sword Verses won’t be bettered by anyone in this field in 2022, I guarantee – and Craig Land‘s blast furnace delivery reminds the listener that this is extreme music they’re listening to, should any doubts persist. Add to his grim-voiced vocal presence the almost constant battering of Tom Atherton‘s percussive entreaties and you would appear to have one of the must-listen British death metal albums of 2022. And I haven’t even begun to enthuse about the superb sleeve artwork yet!

Great stuff then – The Corruption of Virtue deserves a place in all discerning metal album collections, believe me. Can’t wait to see these blokes doing it all live!



The Corruption of Virtue releases on October 7th.