Salt Lake City deathcore band Chelsea Grin releases part one of the suffer pair, Suffer In Hell.

Chelsea Grin started out around 2007, releasing their first EP the following year. The band experimented with different approaches to the heavy and sharp music they were creating over the years, and there were a couple of schisms leading to major line-up shifts. Indeed, no founding members remain in the band today. Up to now they have released five full-length albums to go along with the pair of EPs, the most recent long-player being 2018’s Eternal Nightmare. The new project is coming out in two pieces, the first of which can be had now: Suffer In Hell.

“Origin Of Sin” offers a dramatic introduction to the album. Sinister and dark, it sounds a bit like a battle in a medieval fantasy movie is about to begin. Almost like a Danny Elfman soundtrack, except meaner. The hissing and gravely vocals are what really send the music over the cliff into the land of cruelty – you get a genuine feeling that there is going to be no respite to the dread, and that terrible, terrible things are about to happen. Very creepy. “Foreverbloom” follows and does not brighten the atmosphere at all. The music is more actively brutal, and there is a playful brutality wherein you get the feeling that whatever horrors are being perpetrated are indeed intentional and well planned out. “Deathbed Companion,” in contrast, inspires a sense of deep hopelessness more than fear.

This album, then, has a deliberate and calculated wickedness. The most obvious expression is in the singing, but don’t overlook the ravaging percussion that rears up periodically to the forefront, and the maniacal guitars that have their own irregular gravitational pull. The songs are all on point and brand, yet they purvey delightful differences. Notice, for example, “Floodlungs” with its aquatic oppression and “Mourning Hymn,” an unfathomable divinity. “Suffer in Hell, Suffer in Heaven” is the final track and is perhaps a bridge from this beginning to the second album where we will reach the end. At the finish, which is the middle, I felt a little sore but I still wanted to know how it will all turn out. Recommended.

Suffer In Hell is out on Friday, November 11^th through OneRPM Records. For the record, part two, Suffer In Heaven, will be released on March 17, 2023.

Links.

Chelsea Grin website, http://www.chelseagrinmetal.com/

Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/ChelseaGrinMetal/

OneRPM Records, https://onerpm.com/

© Wayne Edwards