Nothingness – Godslaughter
Release Date: 31st July 2026
Label: Everlasting Spew
Bandcamp
Genre: Death Metal
FFO: Immolation, Morbid Angel, Nightmarer, Aeviterne, Replicant, early Gorguts, Pestilence.
Review By: Malte Brigge
It hurts to move. Torn muscles, bruised bones. I try to blink my eyes past their swelling. My skull throbs as if I’d drunk two fifths of the cheapest whiskey and picked an MMA fight with a bulldozer. I try to clear the grime from my mind and remember what happened. Clutching my ribs, I limp to the bathroom to run cold water and see what I can see, what I can clean up. There’s not enough disinfectant, either for my wounds or the mess I know is lurking in the other room. My mouth feels stuffed with cobwebs, cobwebs cluttered with the dried carcasses of other creatures’ meals. I cough a spatter of lungblood across the sink and recall the events that led me here: Nothingness stopped by, and they brought Godslaughter with them.
Stumbling into the living room, I take in the scene. Pieces of the moldy, corrosive promo material lay strewn about, leaking acidic pus and fuzzy, chunky, Convulsing Putrefaction. I had quipped about how I wasn’t sure how to read the name—are we laughing or slaughtering here?—and the thing started smashing my head in with two brickwalled fists. I take a carving fork and a pair of barbecue tongs from the kitchen to start poking around. Some pieces are still alive, pulsing, undulating, still angry, still trying to fight. Riffs abound, massive and frightening. Songs fling themselves from rolling death metal to thrashy triplets to doomy Sarlacc pits to scorched tremolo runs. It’s fat but sharp, bludgeoning but pointy, filthy and pestilent. Where is that disinfectant, anyway?
From under some slimy mass I scrape away what used to be my best bolo tie, which Godslaughter was feasting on for reasons I won’t question. I try to separate the tightly compressed, overdriven promo pieces from each other to make sense of what all this is, pitying the microphones that must lay gasping in pain somewhere. A thick, freight train of a riff attached to Incinerated Immediately disentangles itself, looking like what you’d get after a three-day bender consuming nothing but Immolation and Wild Turkey. It’s not very big, but it’s meaty, violent and destructive. I want to say this short form is something Nothingness should pay more attention to when Novus Hegemonikon tumbles off the pile, creating breathing room in this festering accretion. It’s six times bigger than Incinerated but bound tightly into a simple, sturdy structure, with room enough for a snarling doom vortex at its center and a breakdown outro that’s nearly impossible to dislodge from ringing ears. An absurdly angry snare keeps smashing things back into place. I wince as my ribs remember its punches.
Incredible Violence may be the most understated song title of the year. I flick away the Vonnegut intro quote when Barclay Olson’s monstrous, multidimensional vocals try once again to scrape my face off with their teeth. Their Carcass-to-Corpsegrinder range helps give some identity to this seething, gurgling stranglehold of an album, and they happily go their own way as the riffs go another without losing contact. My arm recoils sharply as guitars from Novus, Incinerated and Incredible Violence lash out, scratching and scraping my already mushed skin. I shake them off and bits of Nightmarer and Replicant splatter across the walls. Several songs leap to the floor, oozing permanent Morbid Angel-shaped grooves etched into the foundation (Utterly Destructive, Skull Evulsion), and come at me squealing like a 1996 Washburn (Vanquishing Providence, Divine Irresponsibility) jumping with Burn My Eyes energy (Incredible Violence, Trenchant Glunch). They cover and quickly devour my dictionary and Dr. Seuss collection so I can’t look up what a glunch is. A thick, gelatinous trail marks their presence and defines their territory in my life now.
Godslaughter is an eviscerating sonic assault, a suffocating attack that will destroy speakers and make ears bleed. Bones snap under the weight of the aural brutality and a punctured lung leaves me gasping for air. It’s a blistering, diseased, nightmarish, knuckle-dragging batch of thick, beefy brvtality. Songs build from short bursts of inspired destruction to long, raw, muddy extrapolations, not always unified in concept and often slamming to abrupt, neck-snapping halts. When you can actually tell what the riffs are doing, they’re stupidly good, but the production buries much of what Nothingness does. I wish it weren’t so exhaustingly painful to listen to and I really wish it hadn’t destroyed all my furniture. No sense replacing it, though. I know I’ll be listening to Godslaughter again.
(3.5 / 5)
