Created by hi-tech ancient ingenuity and awakened as protectorate of the realm by the threat of atomic warfare, the tusked testudine himself Gamera and his saga act as the subject for this third and most throttled full-length album from Seattle, Washington & Portland, Oregon-based blackened death/thrash metal quartet OXYGEN DESTROYER. High on myriad lore, rocket-legged and feeding from multi-generational reboots there is a shit-ton of back story, dramatic battles and implications of this kaiju’s origins to pull from in generating these nine songs in just under ~35 minutes as they rip through ‘Guardian of the Universe‘ in a clearest and most cutting state. Now reaching their tenth year and finding total mastery of the self this mad-dashing and blasting death-thrash metal crew are still pure spectacle trampling out each song but no doubt their progress in the realm of riffcraft has reached a consistently outrageous state.

Oxygen Destroyer formed in the Seattle area circa 2014 and they’ve been aiming for the highest standard in two-hundred riffs per hour rated death-thrash metal from the start though it took them a couple of demos and an album to finally secure their footing most squarely. Without question their sound was built on pure underground ethos, putting the work into a brutal thrashing level of demand and getting results that’d resembled Demolition Hammer and (early) Vader early on as they worked up to the well-regarded (but later remastered) debut full-length (‘Bestial Manifestations of Malevolence and Death‘, 2018) which’d generally gone over well with me in review at the time but sure, it could’ve used another pass-thru with the knobs and got one soon after. Though many bands might work up to pure pressurized force these folks started there and only seem to have held their shield wall up since, tightening the production values and ramping up the riff count for their second album (‘Sinister Monstrosities Spawned By the Unfathomable Ignorance of Humankind‘, 2021) but generally compounding the general approach of their previous material, setting and delivering expectations that were reasonable in succession and over the top in every case. What’d lacked on the first record and remedied on the second was (again) more-or-less the drum production and the tautness of their rhythms but I think when I’d given short review of that record I’d remarked on how the blackened snarl of the vocals was maybe more pronounced, lending a black thrash edge (or, just a Kreator-like snarl) to their otherwise brutally slapped death-thrash metal ways which I think fans of Hypnosia, Morbid Saint and such would enjoy.

So, where are they going from there? Faster, heavier, and even more tightly wound, more-or-less. ‘Guardian of the Universe‘ once again has that too fast for its own good quality which straddles the line between the ear-clobbering ruin of ‘The Treasures Within‘-era Merciless, amps up its death metal trampling to an Angelcorpse level of bruise and in the process the vocalist kinda has to go a little bit max-level Proscriptor to keep pace and the amount of fills on maniac songs like “Shadow of Evil” definitely have that ‘Abzu‘ level of kill to both their drumming and the ranting descriptions of guitarist/vocalist J.F. aka Lord Kaiju. I figure if those are some of your favorite bands, as they are up there for my own taste, the main suggestion here is that this album completely kills every moment it is playing, a storm of nuclear heat that never stops cutting riffs and whipping the kit. It is definitely the sort of record that could potentially drone on and suck ass to sit with for a half hour if the rhythms weren’t worthy but this time around I felt like they’d uniformly avoided any filler-ass moments or unfitting mosh metal crap.

To start I’d say the ~3-4 minute songs here are king for a first impression made be it the aforementioned key single “Shadow of Evil” or “Eradicating the Symbiotic Hive Mind Entity From Beyond the Void” as these are the songs that’ll get the blood flowing, get the brain in gear for their pace and punch but you really need to sit with the whole thing, all in a row to -get- why ‘Guardian of the Universe’ is as impressive as it is. Not only does this crank the immersive value of their work as everything rifles off one song after another but it feels like the flow of this record has been designed to offer both some moderate variety but also square up for the sake of keeping the energy and riff ideas at maximum impact, each song at least feels like a different direction or touches a different part of the fretboard. Passing from “Eradicating the Symbiotic Hive Mind Entity From Beyond the Void” into “Nightmarish Visions of the Devil’s Envoy” feels like a related thought in terms of its pace and violence engaged but the groove takes its own direction on the latter; The pace even slows to an early 90’s Slayerized death metal roll on “Awakening the Malevolent Destroy of the Heavens and Earth” as they use extended movie clips to help illustrate the opening of the song. This is both one of the coolest parts of the album for its gear up to a Vader-level cracked pace and a unique vocal register which arrives later on in the piece, but at the same time it kinda irks as the clips/voice samples pop up one too many times on this album.

Spend a few days with this record and you’ll begin to feel the level of work machined into every second of its action. While I’d emphasize the extreme element of this record and its brain-whipping tunnel vision enforced throughout what is most new to my ears, or most pronounced about Oxygen Destroyer‘s work this time around is a handful of thrash metal grooves which break out, highlighting experience with sublime neck snapping heat such as “Banishing the Iris of Sempiternal Tenebrosity” and the first ~thirty seconds or so it builds itself upon or the ascending tension of “Guardian of the Universe (The Final Hope)” as it opens the album and ticks past ~2:45 minutes with a ‘Time Does Not Heal‘ worthy warp. Otherwise the listening experience is fairly uniform and of course for this niche and for this band’s specific attack it is exactly right, but for the uninitiated without any real attunement to a certain canonical death-thrash metal approach it might feel like a complete bulldozer of a record. A good thing in most cases and enough to impress a general audience at face value otherwise.

You can’t take a closer ear or eyeball to any one part of Oxygen Destroyer‘s third album and not see/hear pronounced improvement. The effort they’ve put into honing of their craft probably reached an expert level on their second album but here it feels like the render is that much more slick, the songs burning that much hotter, and the whole experience lands substantial enough to sate the undying underground riff hunger but also hold up to frequent repeats per the demanding death/thrash metal ear. Otherwise the cover art helps sustain those expectations with a consistent reprisal of the color palette and fine illustration work from the studious yet stylized Shoggoth Kinetics who pulls off kaiju just as well as Eldritch horrors with brilliant use of deep contrast, textural line work which implies just the right ratio of grey to the image, and conveys action in the way an especially fine illustrated novel. It adds another big check mark on the list of ways ‘Guardian of the Universe‘ aims for a bit more, pushes to a higher standard and ends up better for it. Whether you decide to put it under a microscope or just leave it on in the background I’d felt like this was and especially fine record and another notch on the extreme thrash metal furor released thus far in 2024. A very high recommendation.

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