10 albums in 10 years is ambitious, even for the flower-power psych-rockers of the 70s. Logic suggests you’ll hit a slump at some point. Creative juices can only flow for so long before the well runs dry. Only, Aussie death metal terrors WEREWOLVES disagree. Their fifth album in five years, Die For Us, straight-up punches you in the face just to say “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so”. Dropping like an atomic bomb on your brain cells, Die For Us ditches its airs and graces. This is down-and-dirty, roll-your-sleeves-up death metal. If ever an album could make you soil your pants, it’s this one.
The titular opener’s spoken-word intro fends off the faint of heart — “I suggest that you leave very quickly, and very, very quietly / Or stay, for the extreme violence that is coming your way”. “Posers!” you cry. Sure, just you wait until the tinnitus-triggering assault begins. Matt Wilcock’s flamethrower riffs singe the skin as David Haley’s precision-point shotgun-blasts tear flesh from skin, ready for Sam Bean’s gutturals to grind down your organs.
Die For Us is the sound of WEREWOLVES firing on all cylinders. Beaten Back To Life and Spittle Flecked Rant combine the fierceness and speed of hardcore and D-beat with the power-lifting heft of death metal, whilst Under A Urinal Moon is a stretched-out stomper of a wallower, wading in the murky waters of old-school black metal, the kind you could only create after going on tour with MAYHEM.
This is bar brawl death metal. Fuck You Got Mine’s milkshake-thick wall of noise is like napalm in the garden of Eden, as buzzsaw guitars come for your blood and an injection of melody substitutes for a shot of adrenaline. The likes of The Company Of Wolves and We All Deserve To Be Slaves thrive on bruising blast beats that bulldoze the bones of your skull, burn your meninges, and leave you with bleeding on the brain. All in all, it’s a bloody good time.
Like hip-hop mixtapes from yesteryear, skit-like interludes soak up intros and outros like bread and butter pudding. Fuck You Got Mine’s outback camping experience outro sets up My Hate Is Strong like the punchline to a joke: “Hey, you awake? Yeah. I just want you to know I hate you. That’s fine, cause guess what? I hate you too.” Elsewhere, on the title track, they take aim at themselves in hilarious fashion: “That is a load of shit. I’m sorry, I know there’s gonna be a lot of people who like it but that is fucking unlistenable crap as far as I’m concerned.”
WEREWOLVES don’t take themselves too seriously, but they do take their beatdowns seriously. Die For Us sets its sights on musical elitists, millennial snowflakes and the morally corrupt. Beaten Back To Life cuts the throats of genre gatekeepers like Russell Howard potshotting politicians on-stage at the O2 — “If you do not listen to death metal 24 by 7 / Send you straight to heaven, fuck you / If you think this is elitist, your attitude’s defeatist / It’s useless to resist, fuck you” — whilst Spittle Flecked Rant is a damning diatribe on society’s tendency to jump on the bandwagon of any belief or cause even if they don’t believe it: “Citizens of procrastination / I like my apathy / I pledge allegiance to whatever / You have my half-hearted support / You think I’m talking about your enemies? / Fuck no, I’m talking about you”.
On their fifth album in five years, WEREWOLVES have no right to remain as despicably destructive and delectably distinguished as this. Yet Die For Us, the halfway checkpoint in this decalogy, shows no signs of slowing down. Simply put, this is what death metal’s all about and we’re here for it.
Rating: 9/10
Die For Us is set for release on July 19th via self-release.
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