Review: Cancer Void – First Metastasis
By some terrible miracle, death metal has grown a second heart, and it beats in Prague.
First Metastasis, the debut “mini-LP” from Czech act Cancer Void, is not merely a strong opening statement—it is a malignant herald. Clocking in at just under 20 minutes, this release feels less like a conventional debut and more like a specimen, surgically excised from the diseased tissue of the genre’s past and then studied, spliced, and preserved under glass. There’s a precision here, a cold and clinical self-awareness, that suggests a band not discovering its voice but already fluent in the grammar of decay.
Yet for all its compositional intelligence, the record still pulses with rot. It is that rarest of things in modern death metal: a debut that is as confident as it is contaminated, as tightly wound as it is steeped in dread.
The album begins not with blood, but with breath. The opening track, “Introduction,” plays more like an invasive scan than an overture: a sterile, flickering arrangement of analog synths that conjures the failing hum of fluorescent lights in a forgotten corridor. It doesn’t explode or meander. It waits. It lingers. It generates dread not through volume but vacancy, establishing the sonic equivalent of clinical stillness. Though the title may be regrettably literal, the piece itself is unsettlingly effective: a cosmic horror prologue that primes the listener’s nervous system for the trauma to come.
The true incision arrives with “Breeding Pyramids,” which lumbers forth on a suffocating mid-tempo groove, soaked in doom and dotted with tremolo-picked flares and subterranean growls. Every instrument occupies its own spectral register: guitar work that is cold and surgical, bass lines that dance with unexpected agility, percussion that lands with precise and deliberate force. But at the 2:38 mark, the track mutates. A thunderous bass solo ruptures the structure, injecting a brief, chaotic burst of speed before the composition slinks back into its original doom-laden posture. This moment doesn’t feel like mere variety; it feels like metastasis itself, a thematic mirror of the album’s namesake. The song doesn’t wander. It evolves.
“Encased in Veins” is more confrontational, launching with a hardcore-tinged riff that instantly detonates into blast beats and breathless aggression. At the 0:36 mark, a mucus-soaked BLEGH splits the mix open like a hairline fracture, followed by a flash of bass that momentarily assumes control before the track dives into thrash-adjacent velocity. Despite its speed and fury, the composition never veers into chaos for chaos’s sake. There is groove here—infectious, deliberate, controlled. A final guitar solo emerges toward the end, assertive but unflashy, as if aware it must not linger too long in this scorched terrain.
Then comes “Interlude,” a track whose title again betrays its depth. Rather than serving as filler, it emerges as one of the album’s most unsettling moments. Synths swell and recede like breath through a ventilator, evoking the sterile stillness of a hospital room at night or the soundless void between stars. It does not so much break the tension as redirect it. Less a reprieve than a haunted hallway between traumas, it is music that doesn’t fill space, but haunts it.
“Ammonia Baths,” the EP’s lead single, reintroduces velocity with alarming precision. The tempo leaps, the drumming becomes almost unhinged in its relentlessness, and the riffs surge forward with an urgency that verges on predatory. Yet even at its most frenetic, the track never spills over. Every element is kept on a tight leash, particularly the lead guitar work, which remains sharp, technically adept, and devoid of gratuitous flourishes. The pacing is its greatest asset, offering a focused barrage that never overstays its welcome. If this is the record’s most accessible track, it is also one of its most cunning—a scalpel rather than a hammer, no less lethal for its restraint.
The finale, “Cosmic Caverns of Extinction,” stands as the EP’s crowning achievement: a sprawling, multi-movement piece that shifts between death metal’s brutality and doom metal’s brooding patience. The tempo morphs repeatedly, but never arbitrarily. Guitar and bass engage in interlaced duels, each voice distinct and independently hostile. The bass work, in particular, elevates the track: oozing, coiling, and finally roaring through the mix like a dark fluid finding its own path. The composition is expansive, not for the sake of grandeur, but because it must be. This is not closure. It is complication. The piece feels less like a final word than a warning left unfinished, a question left to fester. It asks not what is dying, but what might be born from that death.
The production throughout is startlingly clear. Each instrument is granted its own space in the mix, and nothing bleeds unless it is meant to. The guitars are weighty without turning to sludge. The bass is expressive and constantly active. The drums are tight, articulate, and ever purposeful. And the vocals—though thick and cavernous—are never smothering. It is a rare feat for a debut release, and an even rarer one in a genre so often content to conflate volume with intensity. Cancer Void opts instead for surgical force. They understand that terror isn’t always in the scream; it often lives in the silence that follows it.
Indeed, First Metastasis is not merely an album. It is an enactment of collapse; a portrayal of cellular betrayal; a sonic imagining of what it means to love something—even your own body—only to watch it be overtaken by something colder, smarter, and hungrier. It does not posture, nor does it plead. It simply unfolds.
And lingers.
This is only the first metastasis. One shudders to imagine the second.
4.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
First Metastasis is out today through Me Saco Un Ojo Records.
