Review: Undersave – Merged In Abstract Perdition

November 6, 2025

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Resurfacing to a Warped World

A name like “Undersave” is not one that grabs the attention simply due to how puzzling it is. A metalhead friend of mine who first heard it thought it was a football manoeuvre and I had to track down the band itself to get an answer – they believed they were saving the underground itself back in the day. It’s aggressively unintuitive but I suppose not unfitting for how historically this Portuguese band’s sound has been defined by extreme specificity since their first album, released back in 2012. Defined by carefully paced structure and amorphous tonality, I reviewed their debut back when the death metal resurgence was still a fresh onslaught sweeping through the genre. Their sound was borne primarily of 90’s “old school” elements but the ambiguous sense of melody and dissonance, hypnotic if lightly repetitive rhythm, and winding structure gave them a sound that did not fit in that category beyond aesthetics. They definitely weren’t a “dissodeath” band nor did they fit into the modern brutal/technical categories, dwelling in a realm on the fringes of all the major schools I have taken to calling “Death In Opposition”, in reference to the original fringe avant-progressive movement.

Their 2018 sophomore would see them descend further into the former domain as noted in my review, taking the Soulside Journey era Darkthrone style lengthy tremolo riffs and shifty patterns into increasingly obtuse, amorphous territories. It had a mesmerizing, quasi-occult kind of entrancing atmosphere that was almost like a caverncore band in a way, devoid of the Demoncy/Incantation undercurrents present, proggy and technical but in the restrained if highly obtuse way normally native to bands like Demilich and Timeghoul. Ever since, Undersave remained a band on the fringes of the burgeoning death metal genre and one of the modern stalwarts of its most unusually specific broad-stroke movements. In the time since, we would not hear much about them although they admittedly had never made a big splash in the first place, at most established as a local band within their specific scene. I would remain in contact with Nuno Braz, the sold founding member who remained, and now and then they might put up a preview video hinting at what was to come.

In the last five years, we have seen strange death metal of an adventurous character experience an uptick. Groups like Diskord, Aenigmatum, VoidCeremony, Epitaphe, and Felgrave have been contorting and twisting their way through a genre increasingly crowded with low effort content slop. Embracing yet deforming conventional narratives of genre, boundary, and history, a front is being formed that no label (even the consistently out-there aims of I, Voidhanger) has been able to consistently create easily replicated parameters for. Perhaps it is simply a consequence of all the major death metal movements up to this point having narrowed themselves into dead ends or the lessons of over 30 years of genre mutation and exploration finally congealing into a particularly evolved form. If there is one thing that hasn’t changed it would be that Undersave’s sound isn’t any less oddly specific.

Merged In Abstract Perdition is both more and less conventional after the 46-minute long anxiety fest of its predecessor. “More” in the sense that the hint of “dissodeath” that crept into their sound previously plays a bigger role, as that movement has long since gone from vanguard to rank-and-file. “Less” in the sense that the heavily mutated early Darkthrone-isms remain as amorphous and difficult to grasp as ever as Nuno and new guitarist André Carvalho stretch these riffs into increasingly desolate, vast expanses.

Jarring chords jut out of a landscape of foggy tremolo picked patterns. Patterns and theme fragment less and changes are less sudden as the band commits to a particular attack plan even if the parts that comprise it are opaque and almost ghost-like in form. The rhythm section of bassist Renato Laia and drummer Pedro Pereira do not take as aggressive a role as a result, folding behind the guitars and Nuno’s deep, warning growl. Mood and atmosphere play an even bigger role here yet songs are shorter as a whole, with only one entering the six-minute range.

The dual guitar interplay that defined the last album also is more specific in function. Rather than a constant stream of almost-but-not-quite intertwining tremolo, André and Nuno tend to save moments of particular dual-guitar interplay for particular junctions within each track. Typically, when a longer, relatively riffier section breaks then they will begin weaving subtler oddball patterns and bendy patterns atop one another leading to moments pensive and hypnotic in nature. It’s a very restrained and calculated approach and it lends itself well to a later Immolation kind of strange, angular guitar work albeit with the drumming going for sustained patterns with far less interruption.

Song structure becomes more streamlined as a result, centering mutative iterations of guitar patterns in unfolding long-form patterns. Whereas previously songs would seemingly fold inwards with repetition only to emerge with increasingly bizarre, towering new depravities now they’ve adopted something simpler than before. They haven’t become necessarily simple music in terms of all the moving parts but while the technique has become more esoteric, the arrangement explains it in less obscured detail. The previously detailed guitar work morphs with each successive iteration in both harmony and shape of riff and technique, and rhythm section follow along to elaborate on unstable mood and atmosphere.

This is a faster Undersave than the prior ones nor in terms of tempo but how much more rapidly it gets to the point. The pervasive, hurried anxiety that has always been there in their sound takes centre stage here with the pseudo-dissodeath touches lending to the uncertainty and unease. It does lose out on a lot of the mystery and ambiguity of its predecessors, whether it’s the debut’s eclectic musical heritage or the multidirectional nature of the sophomore. It is the shortest of the Undersave albums in terms of length though it has the most songs (exempting the short doomy interlude from the first album).

What Undersave loses in compositional breadth and diverse character has been replaced with immediacy of aesthetic and song direction. Is this a fair trade? I’m somewhat mixed on this as a whole. The more overt concessions to the post-Gorguts/Ulcerate/etc. movement make this album feel more “normal” in a sense, approaching more conventional and heavily codified ideals of what comprises the “out there” in general metal discourse. Previously their bizarre mixture of classic death metal roots with contorted arrangement and morphing tonality made it in general very hard to pin down what exactly they were. This isn’t absent per se but the impact has been dulled not just by more prominent influences but also a more overt kind of songwriting; the mystery of deciphering the layers that went into Undersave songs are not as prominent as they were.

A weaker Undersave album is still a more formidable offering that nearly the entirety of death metal this year, progressive, technical, dissonant, brutal-technical, old-school or otherwise. The core focus of ever-tunnelling riffing and carefully paced rhythm still creates an atmosphere of the surreal and of some kind of shapeless horror lurking beyond what one thinks they can perceive. The majority of their sound still rests in a realm that for the most part, is unknown to the death metal public as a whole. Undersave have not watered themselves down or sold out as much as they have condensed their core ideals into its most direct form to date. While the results do not reach the same heights as before, they do show that they still have a vision of something highly specific as opposed to the increasingly codified stylistic porridge that defines the majority of hyped-up death metal. A willingness to craft your own vision of what a genre can be, rather than defaulting to what it already is, gives more compelling results than merely checking the boxes and as the rating makes clear, it was hardly a loss.