Beats and yelling: Sepculrum

Sepulcrum: LaceratorOut 24th July on Chaos Records Chile’s Sepulcrum land the second album with ease, delivering a near perfect elaboration on 2023’s ‘Lamentations of Immolated Souls’ without over stretching themselves. If anything they are an even more efficient beast than before, expanding their expressive range whilst keeping the runtime to a crisp thirty six minutes that somehow feels like a much meatier experience, such is the ease with which Sepulcrum traverse across moods and styles. As with much Chilean death and thrash metal, the core thesis is not to ape old school death metal but to update it, to be guided by their influences without allowing them to dictate terms. Early Morbid Angel and Vader are perhaps the most obvious wellsprings here, but this is merely the equivalent of selecting a font to write with, the words are Sepulcrum’s own as they guide us through a menagerie of riff tessellation, a labyrinthine world of twisting corners and steep inclines. The production…