Category: news

Mastodon have announced their long-awaited new album, Marrow Deep, is set for an August 28 release via Loma Vista Recordings. The news is paired with the release of blistering new single Snakes For Dinner featuring a guest vocal appearance by Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, who also appears in the accompanying music […]

Frontier Touring is pleased to announce the triumphant return of Bryan Adams, bringing his electrifying Roll With The Punches world tour to Australia and New Zealand in February and March 2027. One of the most enduring and unmistakable voices in rock, Adams is a true powerhouse performer whose concerts have become a rite of passage […]

Drummer Bill Ward opens up about the death of Ozzy Osbourne as we near the one-year anniversary of Ozzy's death. Continue reading…

Mastodon have announced their first studio album since their split with Brent Hinds and unveiled a new song called 'Snakes for Dinner' with a guest turn by Josh Homme. Continue reading…

DevilDriver's Dez Fafara reveals a suggestion given to the band has influenced why he feels that 'Strike and Kill' is one of the band's strongest records to date. Continue reading…

Ex-Guns N' Roses drummer Frank Ferrer recently gave his first interview since splitting with the band in 2025 (after roughly 20 years together). Continue reading…

Revisit some classics and dust off some deep cuts. Continue reading…

Jack Osbourne recollects two emotional moments from the epic Back to the Beginning concert. Continue reading…

Decibel is extremely saddened to announce the death of drummer/vocalist Mike Browning, who passed away on July 13, 2026, at the age of 62. A legend of the Florida extreme metal scene, Browning was a co-founder of Morbid Angel with Trey Azgathoth in early ’80s (as well as pre-Morbid Angel acts Ice and Heretic), then briefly performed with Tampa death metallers Incubus before going onto found his own band, the sci-fi death metal act, Nocturnus. The band’s 1990 debut, The Key, remains a death metal benchmark to this day. He’d record drums only on one more Nocturnus record, 1992’s Thresholds, before splitting with the band in 1992.

Browning spent time in several other Tampa metal acts over the next two decades before forming Nocturnus AD in the 2013. A spiritual successor to Nocturnus’ The Key era, the band released a pair of acclaimed albums via Profound Lore Records (Paradox and Unicursal, as well as single via the Decibel Flexi Series in 2024.

Live and die by the sign of The Key! Safe travels on your journey through the cosmos, Mike.

 

The post Mike Browning (1964 -2026) appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

The initiation has come again.

It is impossible to overstate the importance that Death has in relation not only to the subgenre of metal that bears their name, but to the broader extreme side of the movement that emerged in the 90s and is still at its vanguard to this very day. Though Bay Area death/thrash pioneers Possessed are often lauded as the first band to field a complete LP in the subgenre via 1985’s Seven Churches, by the same time this Florida trailblazer that had initially gone under the moniker of Mantas had amassed a comparable haul of original studio material in demo form that was already making the rounds in the tape trading circuit and landing a tad closer to where the fully codified style was in the late 80s.

Sadly, much of the early material in question would not enjoy a finalized studio production by the time 1987’s Scream Bloody Gore came to light, and would since be shelved as mastermind Chuck Schuldiner (R.I.P.) continued to expand his creative palette and repertoire with a highly prolific and ever more eclectic streak of compositional output.

Given the ongoing renaissance that old school death metal has been experiencing for more than a decade, it seems to be fate that a tribute band consisting of some of the musicians that helped bring Schuldiner’s vision to fruition decades ago would take on the task of unveiling the many lost treasures of Death’s formative era. Led by charismatic front man and guitarist Matt Harvey of Exhumed fame and also the lynchpin of the OSDM and Death-inspired project Gruesome, guitarist Rick Rozz and bassist Terry Butler have returned to the roles that they vacated at the end of the 90s under the banner of Left To Die, which is arguably the closest that today’s generation will ever come to experiencing Death as it was when death metal first began to challenge thrash metal for prominence at the dawn of the 90s.

Combined with the manic yet technically precise kit work of Gruesome drummer Gus Rios, this reanimated undead juggernaut trudges out of the graveyard that is the old Florida sound with the fury of a vengeful revenant, blowing more than 4 decades of dust off an explosive medley of lost classics. In almost every respect, the resulting Initium Mortis functions both as a version of Scream Bloody Gore that could have happened in an alternate universe, as well as something that well could have been thrown together by Death in between said debut and their game-changing sophomore LP Leprosy.

The more smoothed out and compressed coat of paint that this receives via a mid-2020s digital production does set it apart from the time period in question, yet Harvey’s incredibly faithful emulation of Schuldiner’s signature guttural roar, combined with his and Rick Rozz’s seamless performance of the riffing and soloing approach that these songs had appropriated from the earliest strides into dark sonic territory made by Slayer, Venom and Celtic Frost, makes for a product that is practically indistinguishable from the original.

Occasional allusions to more traditional metal stylings make their way through at times, with Mantas-era entries like “Rise Of Satan” and “Mantas” betraying some fairly overt nods to Motorhead and Judas Priest that would be largely absent from their sound by the late 80s, though could perhaps be considered early forerunners to the latter-day death ‘n’ roll craze.

Of equal importance to the fact that Left To Die has perfectly recreated the original spirit of death metal primordial state is that they’ve done so by constructing what feels like a proper studio LP. From the highly expositional first foray of “Legion Of Doom” through the raging coup de grace of “Death By Metal”, there is a methodical flow to how this album gets from A to B that can stand on equal footing with what the original titans of the style were serving up between 1987 and 1990.

Standout entries that still come off as frenetic 40 years later, like “Archangel” and “Witch Of Hell,” are made to order for anyone that wants their auditory violence at breakneck speeds yet still possessed of a strong sense of musicality. Meanwhile, the haunting vibes put forth by the chilling instrumental “Zombie” could function as the main theme of its own film soundtrack, occasionally showing some thematic similarities to Iron Maiden’s “Transylvania”, though played about twice as fast. But the one that really brings home the necrotic bacon and points to death metal as it became at its commercial peak in the 90s is “Slaughterhouse”, which brings the brutality in a manner pointing directly to Cannibal Corpse’s Eaten Back To Life.

Left To Die can be seen as many things, from a celebration of a sound that paved the way for a revolution within heavy metal itself, to a bittersweet love letter to a legend that was taken from us all far too early. In keeping with the horrific character that typified Death’s formative years, the way in which these songs are so faithfully polished to a moribund shine results in an experience so vivid that it could be likened to the ghosts of the past screaming forward in time through Harvey’s resounding shouts and Rozz’s screaming leads.

To the survivors of the generation that witnessed death metal’s birth, it’s a nostalgic trip back to the youthful days of chaos in the mosh pit being a novel concept, whereas the younger generation will hear the same revivalist stylings that Gruesome, Skeletal Remains and Morfin have been churning out in tribute to the original for the past 10 years. But no matter what perspective one approaches this album from, the greatness of the artists that originally crafted these songs is not in doubt, nor are the abilities of those that came in to unearth them.

Release Date: July 17th, 2026
Record Label: Relapse Records
Genre: Death Metal

Musicians:

• Matt Harvey / Guitars, vocals
• Rick Rozz / Guitars
• Terry Butler / Bass
• Gus Rios / Drums

Initium Mortis Track-list:

1. Legion Of Doom
2. Archangel
3. Power Of Darkness
4. Zombie
5. Witch Of Hell
6. Rise Of Satan
7. Summoned To Die
8. Mantas
9. Slaughterhouse
10. Death By Metal

Order the album here.

The post LEFT TO DIE – Initium Mortis (Album Review) appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.