apanthropy

Teitanblood
From the Visceral Abyss
Norma Evangelium Diaboli
Released: 3/28/25

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1 – Enter the Hypogeum
2 – Sepulchral Carrion God
3 – From the Visceral Abyss
4 – Sevenhundreddogsfromhell
5 – Strangling Visions
6 – And Darkness Was All
7 – Tomb Corpse Haruspex
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The feeling of darkness is something that eludes most modern death metal, which has co-opted other genres in its current wave, resulting in diluted end products and boring releases. A handful of releases every year seem to shirk the current wave’s trends and bore backwards into the skull and brain of death metal rather than project outward. Teitanblood, hailing from Spain, have produced a dark slab of unholy death metal in their newest release, From the Visceral Abyss, issued through Norma Evangelium Diaboli. The duo of J and NSK exude destructive force through eight new tracks, clocking in at nearly 52 minutes of new material.

From the Visceral Abyss is the fourth full-length released by Teitanblood, whose existence is a bit of an anomaly in 2025. Dark, crushing death metal with a huge, suffocating atmospheric presence.

Almost as soon as the needle hit the surface of the record, ‘Enter the Hypogeum’ clammers into the sound space, cacophonous and crawling. A filtered single guitar and marching beat enter before the abrupt shift into the album’s proper hellmouth. Pounding blast beats shift maniacally into different forms, quick staccato start-stop riffing peels through simplistic passages that invoke war metal leanings. Ugly, twisting leads are scattered like anti-personal mines, courtesy of Javi Bastard’s guest presence. Riffs stack on top of each other into snaring harmonizations and contrasting melodic phrases.

Most of the tracks on From the Visceral Abyss take a long-form approach to composition, with the shortest track clocking at over five minutes and the longest closing the album with nearly a quarter hour in length.

This allows ideas to be fully fleshed out and flayed alive. Songs aren’t limited to verses and choruses as much as they resemble blocks of artillery-destroyed buildings. Each gaping, crumbled structure a riff, lead, or abrupt shift in percussive execution. ‘Sepulchral Carrion God’ is another bottomless-pit dwelling slab of atmospheric crushing death. Much like ‘Enter the Hypogeum,’ riffs ignite, explode, disintegrate into various sub-structures and chaotic interchanges. Otherworldly vocals propel the song forward, echoing guttural hell and furious howling.

The ’Triumph of the Will’ moment for this album is the closer, ‘Tomb Corpse Haruspex,’ which occupies nearly fifteen minutes of space on the record. This is the embodiment of the destructive force that came before it. Harrowing chaotic noise greets the listener before a damnation-invoking chord progression throws the song into a fury of grinding war-metal tremolo and pulverizing blast beats. Session musician CG Santos really shines here, giving an almost Gnaw Their Tongues-approach to noise and structureless audio torture as major atmospheric accents to the track. This is a crowning moment in dark death metal for 2025. Not many bands can replicate the desperate and invasive atmosphere this band crafts with both each individual instrument and the sum of their collective culmination.

Darkness of the crypt and crying from those burning in Hell, Teitanblood represents what so many death metal bands grasp out for but never touch. The sensation of true darkness and misery. There is no room to breathe given here on From the Visceral Abyss, just an apocalyptic demonstration of human destruction.

A worth addition to true death metal hell in 2025, death to fake bullshit.

Label: Norma Evangelium Diaboli
Band: Teitanblood

AJK