• …YOU MISSED • As part of our yearly recap the …You Missed series attempts to collect interesting releases I’d otherwise missed, didn’t cover, or didn’t appreciate until later. This is -NOT- a best of, but a collection of interesting curios worth mentioning as we reflect upon the year. // In an attempt to be more conversational these are more easygoing and casual than longform reviews, so relax and think for yourself. — If you find something you dig go tell the band on social media and support them with a purchase! If you’d like your music reviewed, read the FAQ and send promos to: grizzlybutts@hotmail.com

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The thirteenth full-length album from longtime Siegen, Germany-based troupe ACCU§ER is also the seventh beyond their rebirth circa ~2008/2010 as they’ve worked hard to shake off the dull groove metal of the 90’s that’d plagued their work and returned to a more classic Bay Area-inspired vision of thrash metal. Maestro Thoms has been at it since around ’81 and is still pulling inspiration from the mid-to-late 80’s peak of the sub-genre for inspiration and this not only makes for a consistent classics-bound feeling but an album that paces itself brilliantly, writing harder-edged songs and not just salad tossed cuts of riffs. Much as I appreciate persistence I’ve always had the same issue with this band’s work, it is just absolutely standard stuff. They’re doing it right to be sure and you can feel the modern edge set upon the early 90’s groove metal techniques plus a bit of the ‘Violent Revolution‘ lead guitar ideas seeping in. “Fear Denied” ripped hardest, start there. No real complaints and no wild praise either on my end.

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Gothenburg, Sweden-based trio OMINUM self-released these leftovers from the later 2020 sessions for their 2022-released debut LP back in 2023 but they’d only just found their way to an official release via Witches Brew in late 2024. The main event here are three heavier, groove-oriented thrash metal songs which continue in the style of the band’s debut which centered around fairly intricate mid-paced work not unlike the earlier groove metal you’d found in the early 90’s. Think of Forbidden‘s ‘Distortion‘ from an umpteenth generation perspective and with a pretty solid guitar tone and you’re basically there, throw in some death metal feeling aesthetics and gruff vocals and the picture clarifies. It isn’t entirely what I’m looking for in thrash metal, a bit too plain and unrelated to the ‘old school’, but I appreciate where they’re headed with this style and the strong fidelity of the recording made it easy to approach.

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After reading an ultra-bitchy review of this sophomore full-length by London, England-based quartet THRASHER WOLF I’d found it almost compelling that a writer would put any effort into insulting the cover artist and even the song titles, any sort of personal response to art is valuable I suppose. When sitting down with ‘Inside the Sickened Mind‘ I’m not sure there was so much to complain about, fine enough underground thrash metal production values with some neothrash riffcraft and a theme/gimmick that is communicated clear enough without outright offense given. The band’s main points of inspiration trickle down to the general Bay Area thrash zeitgeist and its more kinetic jabs that both the British and German scenery soaked up back in the late 80’s and did to death. Leads are fairly scarce and their focus is squarely tunnel vision’d on one chunking riff after another but none of this should be alienating if you discovered thrash metal beyond 1999. Not really to my own taste but also nothing to whinge on about.

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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based quintet VICIOUS BLADE arrive upon a mixture of wrathful death/thrash and crust punk influenced movement on this debut full-length album. Notably featuring Castrator‘s Clarissa Badini on vocals it’d be easy to point to say, the more raw side of Sacrilege and Holy Moses for the sake of the vocal roar and the abruptness of their stylistic crossover. Despite a few pretty quick and dirty speed metal feeling pieces this all carries an extreme thrash metal banner up front and focuses on speed and aggression first. Concise, violent, and on a tear for the whole ~28 minutes this is about as much conviction as one could ask for upon introduction to a band in this style.

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Zagreb, Croatia-based quartet NETHER and their combined interest in challenging death metal, modern groove metal, and classic thrash metal might’ve called it quits in 2024 but they managed a pretty well unique sophomore full-length album before they did. ‘The First Encounter‘ takes the primal death-thrashing brutishness of their two most recent EP releases and makes an atmospheric progressive death-thrash metal record out of it with some black metal inspired riffcraft here and there, all of it surreal rather than playful or overtly traditional. Of course I’ve been a fan of this band since their first album released (and I released that plus their follow-up EP on cassette myself) and I greatly appreciate the way they’d taken this idea to its conclusion doing their own thing the whole way through. I don’t doubt Lovro and crew will do more with music as they’ve clearly a lot of passion and talent for composition.

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Ontario, Canada-based trio SLAVE AGENT returns for a second and far more extensive album which reminds us that not every band decided to drop their Vektor influences after the manufactured personal drama that hit the internet in the late 2010’s. Of course there is much more to their sound overall especially as they follow the short and somewhat incomplete thought of ‘Alternate Histories‘ with a more fleshed out almost ‘Forbidden Evil‘ type of sting to their attack. I wouldn’t say that guitarist Tyler Lindstone‘s (Autonoesis) vision for the band’s imagery, lore and likely compositions are wildly original but all of this is relatively unique in an era where money-having fandom has been allergic to technical thrash metal since 2016 or so. Even if sci-fi shuttled thrash isn’t your thing maybe stick around for “Alien Tomb” and see if these folks can impress you with some hyper-thrashing shred in the longform.

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I would normally do a full and extensive review of an album like ‘Crypts of Mind‘ from Athens, Greece-based progressive death/thrash metal quintet BLASTEROID but I’ll tend to procrastinate on a review when all I have is a private stream link rather than files to cart around the Earth, this is less a complaint and more an explanation as this is exactly my kind of shit. Completely pro album art (Dan Goldsworthy) and production (George Emmanuel) let us know this band is serious as Hell out the gates but it is the rabid, machine-gunned tech-thrash strike they deliver with opener “The Final Parsec” that cements this record as one of the more notable in this style for 2024. Tact, tension and beauteous breaks are all well and good for the prog-death experience and in that sense their work intentionally combines the surreal prettiness of the 2000’s with the volatile yet precise skeleton of the niche’s 90’s origins, a sound fans of Vektor, Cryptic Shift and Pestifer (Belgium) will immediately appreciate. Brilliant stuff, love the overall flow of the record and the speed they’ve kept it all burning at and I think the only real feedback I have is that they’ve probably outgrown this band name at this point, though I like the 90’s tech-thrash look and feeling their aesthetic amounts to.

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Joensuu/Lappeenranta, Finland-based death-thrashing metalpunk trio SCUMRIPPER are among the best doing it these days and I was surprised as shit when ‘For a Few Fixes More‘ hit because back in 2019 when their debut LP (‘All Veins Blazing‘) landed it barely registered on my radar. Here they’ve got this ferocity, something like Nekrofilth‘s meaner biting hardcore ‘tude that makes their caustic 80’s death metal sound strike that much harder. It turns out that the big difference here for me is the hardcore punk influence pumping up louder, their swinging death metal grooves sticking to riff-based choppers and a general uptick in variety which leaves room for some melody and varied tempo. If its on Headsplit you know you’re either getting some dumbass goregrind or something with elite riffs and in this case it is the latter in the sense that each song finds its distinction in the crawl and clobber of its rhythms. For my own taste this is one of the better surprises of 2024 if you like all those points where 80’s death metal syncs up with crossover, gore metal, and gutter thrash. Keep in mind the other formats for this release will be out in January on Dying Victims Productions so keep an eye out.

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Valparaíso, Chile-based trio ACROSTIC are one of the more interesting, idiosyncratic metalpunk outliers from their area as they combine influences from local ‘old school’ thrashers, the worldwide scenery of the late 80’s as well as a love for hardcore punk and grindcore… a sound which they collectively call “noisethrash”. They do a fine job of combining classic sounds which feel like they consider the South American metalpunk reality first and then the more universal interests so, one song might have a bit of Ratos de Parão (or, Dorso) but you can tell they also keep up with the thrash metal coming out today, Chile and elsewhere, to some degree. The collage cover art and the crust inspired layout definitely caught my eye but it was the classics-minded but extreme feeling of this music that’d pulled me into this one. Of course if you are looking for standard thrash rather than crazed metalpunk politico this won’t suit you but for me there is a great balance of crossover, heavy metal and extremity here if you’re able to stick around for the whole ride.

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Prague, Czechia-based quartet FAÜST are another group who’d surprised me beyond the face value of this sophomore full-length album thanks to shotgun-heavy guitar tones, brilliantly loud production values, a strong bass guitar player and some manner of electric speed metal energy helping to fire up their more moshable moments. The neck-whipping flow of this album impressed me most, out of all the records I picked to put on this list these folks put up the biggest ass-shaker, a metal record that makes you want to move by the sheer damned energy of it and that isn’t a small accomplishment when you’ve literally heard it all a hundred times over. When paying closer attention to the riffs, the lyrics and the general rub of ‘Death Galore‘ you can tell they’ve got taste which runs much broader than speed/thrash metal and shouted-at crossover and I appreciate how all of that funnels into the cutting rush that most of the full listen serves. Again, far better than the first impression might’ve served so give these folks a fair shake.

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