Album Review: Vulgar Mephitis – From Dust
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Death metal is having itself a hell of a year. It might be that fate has just happened to find me in her favour lately, but every death metal release I’ve fished from the promo list thus far has been on the right side of “good”, with some (Sallow Moth, Thaetas) being downright exceptional even within a crowded field. Stiff competition, then. Still, pressure builds a diamond – and here comes Pennsylvania’s Vulgar Mephitis with a repository of the meanest riffs your febrile imagination can conjure. We’re on the blast train now boys, and we’re not stopping ‘til we’ve scorched your fucking skin off.
If you’ve heard Vulgar Mephitis’ suitably nasty debut EP, you know what you’re in for. Brace for impact. A locomotive at light speed, churning vortices of convoluting riffs and slams, drums and gurgles painting sky and earth in carrion hues. Terror campaigns of arthropod riffs scurrying about the fretboard, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it swerves and dives in snappy venom injections of songs like “Peer into the Abyss”, it’s rhythms unpredictable but always predatory, sudden tempo switches flicking out so frequently it’s hard to take in at first. “To Dust” shows the band slipping oily tentacles into Ulcerate’s unwholesome territory, with a malfeasant, twisted sense of melody thrashing barbed limbs out of a cold, discordant cage. The album constantly twists in vertigo inducing variations upon the simple theme of punching your lungs through your spine. It refuses to stay still. Slams jostle in emetic waves, nauseous tides of gutter-floor grooves. “Gorging on Greed” births numerous of these, swinging them at you from their umbilical cords like medieval flails. Drumwork is as dizzying as everything else, spitting chunks from one grinder to the next, one minute a cymbal-riding groove driven by frantic kick drums, next the type of blastbeat marathons that burn calories like kindling. To call it “technical” would be true, but nonetheless massively understating how insanely intricate the music is.
If the album has a problem it’s one of memorability. In the moment of listening to it the album is like standing beneath a comet, it will just flatten you – but after the fact what few of your neurons do remain loosely conjoined won’t be in much position to remember much. I felt like I’d been jumped; a remorselessly violent experience to be sure, but I can’t necessarily recall exactly which kick turned my liver into mince, which stamp to the skull first let my brain have an unfiltered look at the world, etc. It is possible to build hooks into even music this unbridled without sapping the testosterone – much of Internal Suffering’s discography lives rent free in my head, Disgorge tracks are indelibly inked into my memory, and I’m fairly sure that even when dementia claims the last fond reminiscences left to me I’ll still be humming along to “Execration Text” by Nile. Future releases – which I’ll be watching for with masochistic enthusiasm – could be absolutely legendary if the band could work in the sorts of incendiary earworms that, say, Unfathomable Ruination unleashed on their “Finitude” release.
Good brutal death should be crushing. It should be unhinged. You should feel at the end as though you’ve been lobbed into a centrifuge full of xenomorph blood. Vulgar Mephitis tick all three of those boxes then jam the pencil through your eye socket. It’s fitting that it releases on the 11th September because this too feels like being hit with a plane. In both doing themselves proud and continuing death metal’s killing spree on into the latter third of 2026, Vulgar Mephitis establish themselves as sure-fire genre heavyweights in the making. Do yourself a favour and hop on the blast train early.
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