Undeath

The dead walk again! New York-based Undeath have returned from their mutilated tomb to horrify and dominate death metal’s insatiable masses once again. Their blessedly sick new album, It’s Time… To Rise from the Grave, shows the reconfigured quintet—Kyle Beam (guitars), Alexander Jones (vocals), Tommy Wall (bass), Jared Welch (guitars) and Matt Browning (drums)—have retained their mind-infecting sonic savagery but weren’t satisfied in their pursuit to improve it through wicked (yet studied) reformulation. Certainly, Undeath’s 2021 Decibel flexi, Diemented Dissection, paved the way, but it’s tracks like “Fiend for Corpses,” “Rise from the Grave,” and “The Funeral Within” that display Undeath’s terrifyingly insane trajectory. It’s Time… To Rise from the Grave isn’t just an early contender for death metal album of 2022—it’s destined to be a modern-day classic.

“Thanks to the pandemic, we had a lot of time to figure out what we were going to do,” says vocalist Alexander Jones. “We had a lot of opportunity to luxuriate in the writing process. We wanted to make the songs tighter. We wanted a more traditional approach to the songs—a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus-kind of thing; like the title track to Lesions of a Different Kind. We didn’t just want one song to be that way, but all of them to have that approach. Every song needed to have a big chorus. We wanted infinite replay value. I’d like to believe we achieved that.”Undeath formed in Rochester, New York in 2018, and eager to show their devotion (and chops) to the elder death metal gods, original trio—Beam, Jones, and Browning—charted a course out of the proverbial cemetery the following year with their first offering Demo ‘19. The same year, the ever-quick songwriters dropped their second demo, Sentient Autolysis, in conjunction with Tampa-based indie Caligari Records. Word spread quickly that Undeath were rolling out of the Empire State strong, much like their forefathers in Cannibal Corpse, Immolation, and Mortician infamously had decades earlier. Stoked on Undeath’s bludgeoning yet song-first creativity, Los Angeles-based Prosthetic Records inked the New Yorkers in 2019. The group’s debut album, Lesions of a Different Kind, pyosisified fans and ossified critics mere months later. Pitchfork complimented Lesions of a Different Kind by saying it was “vicious and nauseating,” while Bandcamp were caught up in the album’s “catchy, hard-hitting” songs. Clearly, Undeath’s tightly-wrought, skull-crushing death metal had struck a chord.

“We are all excited about making music,” Jones says. “We’re stoked to be writing together. That’s why when we write, we do it early and often. We’re all students of Autopsy, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, and Bolt Thrower, to name a few. These bands are our north star. We love the way they approached their songwriting—it was always very hooky. We love classic, essential death metal, but we’re also into the more recent stuff, too. Bands like Fetid and Cerebral Rot. We sit in the middle ground, I think. We take inspiration from the past, the present, and make it our own. We want to serve the genre we love so much.”