Exclusive Track Premiere: Escarnium’s “Relentless Katabasis”
Retreat. Retreat. Retreat.
On May 9, 2025, Brazilian death metal quartet Escarnium will release Inexorable Entropy, the band’s first album for venerable Everlasting Spew Records. The release of the band’s fourth full-length coincides with a tour of Mexico, itself a prelude to an extensive European tour in November 2025. Today, we’re thrilled to bring you an exclusive track premiere of the album’s lead single “Relentless Katabasis.”
Playing a style of death metal most comparable to legends Incantation, Immolation, and Krisiun, Escarnium combine blitzing speed with an oppressive, gloom-choked atmosphere. Riffs swarm and envelop you in foul obscurity. Nestor Carrera’s fatigueless drumming marshals you ever forward to the darkest of fates. Victor Elian’s vocals invade your psyche, roared with no abandon. Fans of 2022’s Dysthymia will find “Relentless Katabasis” as a progression of the formula at work with excellent tracks “Inglorious Demise” and “Deluged in Miasma.” The only difference? Sergej Dukart’s mixing and mastering has made the guitars more prominent, solidifying and thickening their sound while making things even clearer. The whirling madness of it all is still there, of course, but everything sounds bolstered. At around 2:20, we are all marching to the shores in an endless repetition of our humbling defeat and great loss.
In “End-times for Humanity,” Claire Colebrook writes, “History suggests that the more we define ‘the human’ as a subject of intellect, mastery, and progress—the more ‘we’ insist on global unity under the umbrella of a supposedly universal kinship—the less possible it comes to imagine any other mode of existence as human.” Because of our insistence on a single vision of “the human,” our worst nightmares—our doomsday scenarios and our dystopias—often take for granted that many, many people already live that. That is, the West’s worst-case scenarios are frequently just what the West has done to other parts of the world and is currently doing to itself. “By ‘end of the world,’” Colebrook continues, “we usually mean the end of our world.” Escarnium, whose band name roughly translates to mockery, derision, and ridicule, takes nothing lightly. In both song title and album title, there is a sense of unyielding inevitability, of constancy and/in plight. Too, nihilism and despair, perhaps antithetical, permeate “Relentless Katabsis.” We are all “sick, dying scum,” mere life “grafted from scraps.” The world is spiteful, inhumane, and ghoulish. They seem to perfectly understand, to play music that sounds like what Colebrook is suggesting here: what are the costs to attain and sustain “our” world? #hat entitles us to such a world in the first place? Aren’t the end-times always already present and haven’t they always been? Eschatological. Historical. Material. In whatever capacity we envision the end of everything, the end of everything for Escarnium is forever unfolding from a nameless past to a timeless future.
Hit play on the video below and get engulfed in our eternity of catastrophe.
Inexorable Entropy will be unleashed May 9, 2025,
on CD/Tape/Digital via Everlasting Spew.
Vinyl will follow in Autumn 2025.
