The intoxicating fervor of an increasingly dogmatic pseudo-reality is the après-pox, a widespread maniacal hallucination treated as the veil pierced, false truths arisen beyond mass death. The wise fellowes in Utrecht, Netherlands-based black metal quintet GRAFJAMMER depict this mania hanging in the air with brutal swings of a club, a primitive solution to bat away increasingly complex psychic disorder. As a fourth full-length album ‘De Tyfus, De Teerling‘ is once again characteristic of the band’s work, a representative flailing of limbs which further tweaks the ratios on their crust/speed metal burnt sound.

Grafjammer were founded circa 2007 having found their formative years long and lineup slow shifting ’til around 2014 or so prior to their debut’s release. Since I’d written about the band a couple of times in the past for album number two (‘Schalm & Schabaw‘, 2018) and three ‘De Zoute Kwel‘, 2020) it’d make sense to suggest up front that the main composer(s) find their distinction within some manner of speed metalpunk for flourish, a sound which I’ve compared to a certain era of Darkthrone as well as Impaled Nazarene depending on the album. We can approximate those bursts of hardcore punk/crust where UK82 and the earliest waves of speed metal began inspiring nascent black metal in tandem though said merger is often the core, but not the focus of their sound rhythmically speaking. Their guitar work is given its loudest voice via somewhat melodious black metal (“Bloedbruid“) written for two guitars and gleaned from the ~early second wave ’til now. You’ll get shades of nowadays black metal’s melodic searching melancholia for the sake of a sombre tone though we’re never that far from wheeling into some type of black n’ roll/metalpunk (think: early Kvelertak, Whiskey Ritual, etc.) gear. All of these signature sounds are ablaze, inflamed and up front here on ‘De Tyfus, De Teerling‘ yet it feels like a raw, unplanned event that digs in and rallies out, a prime night on stage.

My favorite moment on the whole of ‘De Tyfus, De Teerling‘ is probably the step from the final riff of “Hachel Mijn Bout” into “LijdensVerlenger”, an early DC hardcore meets raw black metal kinda strike and one of the better pieces on the album with consideration for the latter song. This is probably an idiosyncratic choice, though, on my part as most will only just perk their ears at mid-album heat “KrengenSlagers” and its Celtic Frost/Darkthrone-type lunging at its riffs. I’d appreciated “Bertken” for similar movement, distilling that type of stop-n’ bend verve to d-beaten rhythms, at least until the end of the song jigs and wretches during its dramatic clean bellowed vocal turn. These pieces best showcase a fluid, brisk movement from piece to piece and a cracked-through brutality to their presentation which helps even ~4-5 minute songs go down as anthemic, dramatic exposition and punk-fucked black metal riffcraft.

A cage of rattled drums makes for an immediate, almost live-in-studio rawness on approach of ‘De Tyfus, De Teerling‘ and this, paired with the two complimentarily scuffed raw rhythm guitar tones, finds the album escalating into various states of chaos and faster paced focus as its key heartbeat, the prime vacillation of its pacing. This is not out of the ordinary for Grafjammer‘s lugubrious ways though there were a few songs on here which seem out of left field and… surprisingly good as we consider the surreal “RamPokker” a standout as well as one of the better songs to showcase the placement of each instrument in their overall rawly present sound design. Exploring this type of melancholic and raw-presented form speaks to revelry and existential dread at once, swinging one moment and with a serious scythe cutting into the next. This song set the tone for the second half of the full listen, otherwise I’d say they’ve become increasingly comfortable folding more hardcore punk sped muse into their meandering primary rhythm guitar voice album-over-album. It was cool to hear the dreary melodic edge of this album hover over its more abrasive and immediate action and this was where it’d been the most surreal.

Despite some considerable change in their line-up beyond the previous album and several years in between Grafjammer have done well to re-source their own sense for flowing, miserable crustiness and make an ancient, primitive feeling black metal record out of it. While exploring broad interest in past and present generations of black metal they’ve found distinction that benefits from classic metalpunk excess as much as it speaks today’s unflinchingly melodic triomphe. Having been a fan of the two previous albums I’d found this record more abrasive and melodic up front but equally representative overall, suggesting that even without so much consideration for a variety of sub-genre tics and inspirations many of these songs stand tall in their own right. A moderately high recommendation.

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