Sacrilege Infernus Out 25th July, self-released

Access to culture has never been easier. Deciding what to access and spend time with near impossible. People idolise the traditional underground for its asceticism. The implied discipline required to enter an obscure channel of culture. The music itself a challenge of dense, alien sounds born of a hermetically sealed existence. Value arises from scarcity. Cherished, hard won artefacts.

The instincts of modern extreme metal run contrary to this. Although still hardly mainstream in the artistic sense, the logic of digital platforms as a means of distribution and promotion is evident all around us, resulting in a hard pivot toward visibility and audience engagement. Album teasers, lyric videos, TikTok playthroughs, interview cycles, and endless mailouts to sympathetic platforms. All stake a claim on digital real estate, forcing their way into our content diets.

Lethal Prayer’s first album in nearly thirty years implies a nostalgia for a time when things were harder. Announced to a select group of people, the only evidence of it existing at all a light sprinkling of third party coverage, and an email address if anyone wants to request a CD. This word of mouth tactic runs so counter to today’s social media engineered impulse for total visibility that it will look to some like geriatric naivety (“don’t they know how to promote an album?!”). Obscurity is guaranteed, and precisely the point.

Is there anything to this concerted effort to contrive scarcity? It should be noted that death metal is still, in the grand scheme of things, a deeply troubling prospect for the average citizen. It is, despite everything, underground music. But there’s no denying the fact that years of hyper visibility have rendered profound changes on metal culture. How else do you explain OSDM, pizza thrash, Anthony Fantano’s metal content, or whatever overhyped slop Decibel are pushing this week? All corroborate Schopenhauer’s assertion that “as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents”. Casual fans claim access to the secrets of death metal with little regard for its complex, multi-channel history.

In this context, what at first appear to be truly low effort release tactics on the part of Lethal Prayer actually imbue this album with a sense of prestige. Acquiring the album’s contents feels “earned”, the music itself a storied showcase of “metal” in the abstract, requiring a degree of familiarity with the rich musical traditions it draws upon in order to fully grasp what’s going on here. Although death metal forms the backbone throughout ‘Sacrilege Infernus’, freeing themselves of any specific genre allegiance or aesthetic detaches the album from the branding jargon that passes for genre chat in 2025.

Despite the nearly thirty year gap between this and ‘Spiritual Decay’, there is a clear continuity between each album, specifically the brazen entitlement Lethal Prayer display toward preestablished vocabularies, freely playing and manipulating them at will. That being said, ‘Sacrilege Infernus’ immediately strikes one as a brighter, more playful, and overtly progressive statement than the debut. Gone are the imposing walls of dark ambience bleeding into meandering doom passages, replaced by a more surrealist, avant-garde framing of the metallic material.

The stylistic and technical promiscuity of this album makes summarising its overall structure and flow a challenge. Primitive death and black metal elements frontload the material, evincing such a rare degree of authenticity and spontaneity that they seem to emanate from a bygone age. But the music’s orientation is undeniably progressive, laid out in multi-dimensional rhythmic punches, disorientating staccato passages where drums, bass, and guitar seem to compete for airtime, forcing any homogeneity aside for the sake of a heated exchange of views.

Moments of unity are most notably defined by primitive hammer blow riffing ripped straight from the old school grindcore playbook. Guitar leads are unique not just for their freeform, Azagthothian madness, but the command they demonstrate over the rhythm section. Like an orchestra in a concerto, multi-dimensional and conflicting musical threads are forced to coalesce and pull together in order to undergird the unbridled abandon of the lead instrument.

A dual vocal attack of mid-range barks and guttural growls only adds to the panoramic assault. Each lengthy track is architecturally idiosyncratic. Episodic rather than narrative in structure. The overall tone reveals itself at unexpected nodes, but an underlying intentionality remains, a common theme, rhythmic signature, or refrain binding otherwise unrelated ideas together, creating an uncanny marriage of the domestic and the alien.

Although told through the traditional atonal language of death metal, classical melodies and harmonies strike the bedrock of the music at key junctures, resituating the emotive context and granting the listener a different perspective on the experience, most notably on the finale to ‘Valar Morghulis’.

Lethal Prayer insert a wealth of influences into this album, but all are fully digested, understood, and integrated into the final statement. A triumph of knowledge and experience alongside a willingness to take risks when it matters. Random prog gestures sit happily alongside the blunt axe of caveman death metal. You will be humming some of these riffs days later, only to forget that, despite their catchiness, they are embedded within a plethora of self generating complexity.