Decrepit Altar - Egregious Defilement

“The Festering Depths” releases with clean guitars stretched into a distant echo, an inverted calm that immediately collapses into low, dragging riffs and drums that land like slabs. The guttural vocals operate less as a performance and more as a presence, wet, reverberating, and tuned to the same wavelength as the meaty bass anchoring the track. The song doesn’t build, it sinks, and that descent is the point.

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“Beckoning of the Moss Ridden Tombs” shifts the pace a notch without breaking from the record’s subterranean logic. The dissonance thickens, reshaping the space into something colder and more oppressive. Hints of variation in the riffing function as brief flare ups inside the monotone horror, not relief. The imagery comes easily with muck, darkness, and a sense of being sealed in.

“Fields of Flayed Skin” closes the EP with a broader sense of desolation. Eerie leads cut through the gloom before the track swells toward a rupture that never arrives, pulling back instead, leaving only the residue. It’s an effective ending, not because it surprises but because it maintains the EP’s discipline of no theatrics, just erosion.

Carrying Egregious Defilement is coherence. Every choice reinforces the same hostile environment. The guitars serve the void, the drums dictate the crawl, and the vocals render the landscape uninhabitable. Melody is absent by design. The result is a focused, claustrophobic debut that signals a band already fluent in its own darkness.

8/10

Words by Fuego Casa

In collaboration with Headbangers Australia

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