Revolver Magazine is hosting the exclusive first public streaming of Slave To The Scalpel, the pulverizing debut LP from Cleveland, Ohio-based death metal outfit 200 STAB WOUNDS. The record is streaming now ahead of its release this Friday through Maggot Stomp.
Unloading nine savage tracks in a gory twenty-seven minutes, 200 STAB WOUNDS’ Slave To The Scalpel was recorded and mixed by Andy Nelson at Bricktop Recording in Chicago, Illinois (Weekend Nachos, Jesus Piece, Harm’s Way), mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege (Obituary, Integrity,), and completed with front cover art by Rahma Gutslaughter.
The band offers, “We wanted to step it up after the release of our EP, Piles Of Festering Decomposition. The songs are heavier, faster, and more creative. We just wanted to create a riff-filled roller coaster ride of brutality and are proud of what we accomplished. We just finished up our first tour, over twenty dates where we headlined most of the shows. We played a good number of songs off the new album every night and carnage ensued.”
Revolver dubs Slave To The Scalpel, “easily one of the most fresh and exciting death-metal albums of the entire year,” continuing, “On songs like ‘Skin Milk’ and ‘Tow Rope Around The Throat,’ 200 STAB WOUNDS channel the farm equipment-sized riffage of bands like Cannibal Corpse and Bolt Thrower, and combine that with the destructive grooves of hardcore-minded groups like Nails and Xibalba. With terrifically slicing production that makes the guitar tones spin like chainsaw blades and the drums hit like ten-car pile-ups, the band find the perfect balance between memorable riffs and plentiful breakdowns without ever becoming a redundant slog. It’s a fucking crusher…”
Let the gore of 200 STAB WOUNDS’ Slave To The Scalpel pour forth at Revolver Magazine RIGHT HERE.
Slave To The Scalpel will be issued through Maggot Stomp on CD, cassette, digital formats this Friday, November 12th, with the vinyl edition due to land in early 2022. Find preorder options HERE.
Having just returned home from their 21 Ways To Lose Your Life Tour, additional live actions will be announced. Watch for additional updates from 200 STAB WOUNDS to post in the coming weeks.
The number may seem a tad excessive, but even at the most surface-level, 200 STAB WOUNDS would look gnarly as hell. There’s a case of diminishing returns with each puncture, with the likelihood you just struck the fatal blow decreasing with each incision. This is the complete opposite of 200 STAB WOUNDS, whose fatality rate skyrockets with each guttural, groovy riff and double-bass laden blastbeat. The band’s debut LP Slave To The Scalpel adds nine new corpses to the band’s morgue of tracks, bringing the total to a mere fourteen.
The speed with which the bodies built up is the impressive part; even the most prolific serial killers don’t stack them this high, this fast. It will be just twenty-one months since they formed in January 2020, when a previous project simply couldn’t bear the weight of the songs they were writing. The resulting EP Piles Of Festering Decomposition shot the quartet to the forefront of the new breed of death metal bands. Though many acts will rot away when extreme metal shifts their sights to another sound, 200 STAB WOUNDS cemented their status by sharing the stage and road with bands like Gatecreeper, Sanguisugabogg, Devourment, Internal Bleeding, Creeping Death, Knocked Loose, Year Of The Knife, and God’s Hate.
It’s not just the quality of those peers that makes them stand out but the diversity. The fact they can fit with knuckle-dragging hardcore is indicative of a simplistic, rhythmic bounce. Somewhere between Gatecreeper’s “stadium death metal” and Devourment’s outward slamming take on the genre, 200 STAB WOUNDS makes brutality catchy. In doing so, they occupy a space often reserved for legends like Dying Fetus and Cannibal Corpse.
In fact, Slave To The Scalpel is full of bile-laden references to cannibalism, including flesh in tiny snack form, a delicious stew, milk made of skin and even a raw penis filled with curdled semen. If it makes you squeam, don’t let on; simply devour more 200 STAB WOUNDS or you could be at the receiving end of their scalpel next.
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