It’s pretty hard to to determine Cannibal Corpse’s most endearing personality trait. Oh, what’s that: they’re all real nice guys? Oh come on, surely it can’t be that surprising that guys who have made a 24-year career out of writing death metal songs about extreme (and fairly esoteric) murder scenarios could be normal dudes/responsible dads. Drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz even used the word “sir” in an interview like we were grocery shopping in the 1950s and not in actual fact discussing whether 2009’s Evisceration Plague was going to live up to the contemporary Cannibal classic Kill—it very nearly did, and for the title track alone, arguably bettered it. And Cannibal Corpse’s blue-collar approach to business—always accessible to the kids, with a work ethic that sees them unafraid of putting in a shift on tour or in the studio—is an example to some death metal bands of their peer group and zip code that now operate in semi-retirement. But, shit, their most redeemable feature has got to be their focus.

When Torture drops it will be the Florida-via-Buffalo quintet’s 12th album in 24 years, and not once have they thought about fucking with the recipe, selling us short with a diluted pastiche of themselves, or worse still, entering the death metal arms race that left the sick jams all homogenized and sanitized. You can rely on Cannibal to preserve the genre’s quintessence: They write catchy death metal songs about gruesome murders, and that’s that.

Sometimes their songs can be kinda hilarious, just in terms of the homicidal hyperbole going on lyric-wise. Albums such as Butchered at Birth, Tomb of the Mutilated and The Bleeding perfected lyrical extremity for metal; like “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt” and “I Cum Blood” are 60:40 hilarious to gnarly. But they are almost always 100 percent awesome.

Torture is the third Cannibal Corpse album to be produced by Erik Rutan. Sessions were split between Rutan’s MANA studio in St. Petersburg, FL and Sonic Ranch, in Tornillo, TX, where they recorded Bloodthirst, Gore Obsessed and The Wretched Spawn. You can read all about it the making of the record in the current issue of Decibel, but rest assured Rutan has kept them on-point with the performances, and Rob Barrett and Pat O’Brien outdid themselves in meeting the brutal riff quotas imposed on them (check out the verse riff 30-odd seconds in; it’s a doozy).

Anyway, here is your hammer-smashed stream, “Encased in Concrete”. Is it just us or does this seem like a sequel to “Mummified in Barbed Wire”?



**Cannibal Corpse Torture is out 13th March through Metal Blade. Buy it HERE. **

Pic: Alex Morgan