Keith Richards once said, “Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.”
This is a thought maybe dawning on the band members of BEATEN TO DEATH as they prepare to uncage their new album, “Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis”.
The Norwegian outfit claim that they have all “aged horribly” since the band’s acclaimed last album, “Last Maar, Ik Verhuis Naar Het Bos”, was released in 2021 and have embraced that natural process and its theme within their May 31st and Mas-Kina Recordings released new full-length, and indeed the positivity it brings.
Dismiss those thoughts of a band slowing down and settling into a more relaxed acceptance of things though for Beaten to Death are as uncompromising and voracious as ever and “Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis” ensures no one will have any doubts. Unleashing their familiar and fiercely individual torrents of grindcore dispute with melodic discord, the new offering is Beaten to Death at their most physically merciless, creatively ravenous and gleefully mischievous.
Unleashed on the grindcore scene back in 2011, Beaten To Death has quarrelled with and dismissed expectations of the genre and the boundaries of any hardcore fury from day one. It has seen their five full-lengths from debut “Xes and Strokes” through to “Last Maar, Ik Verhuis Naar Het Bos” greedily welcomed and frequently acclaimed. Of course their sixth full-length holds nothing back in its dismissal of trends and expected processed procedures in its making either, broadly grinning at both and having fun with the themes it takes apart.
As with all their releases, “Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis” was recorded live and mixed by guitarist Tommy Hjelm with its body to be wrapped in the expressive art of William Hay. It is a marker for a band forging new triumphant misdemeanours and profound examples of pure incitement for maturity or should that be joyous immaturity?
A taster of its irreverence and wares come with lead single, “My Hair Will Be Long Until Death”, a song ‘presumably about being a True Norwegian Melodic Grindcore bass player with no self-awareness’ and taking the listener on a rampage of corrosive fury and expectation disabling adventure.
Age brings maturity they say and the Oslo-based quintet certainly embraces it within “Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis”, twisting it into another plaything for their sonic ravening and impassioned take no prisoner revelry, a record with which Beaten To Death are sure to shake things up once again.
Beaten to Death are:
Anders Bakke – Vocals
Martin Rygge – Guitar/Backing Vocals
Tommy Hjelm – Guitar/Backing Vocals
Mika Martinussen – Bass
Christian “Bartender” Svendsen – Drums