Exclusive Track Premiere: Feral’s “Bound to the Dead”
We don’t have to outlive.
On October 18th, Swedeath mainstays Feral will release their fourth full-length To Usurp the Thrones, the anticipated follow-up to last year’s much ballyhooed split with labelmates Crawl. Hoping to build on the success of both last year’s split and 2018’s Flesh for Funerals Eternal, Feral has promised to “[launch] a massive, comprehensive onslaught… to eliminate all competition in the Swedish death metal realm.” So far, we’ve been force-fed two slabs of hefty and powerful death metal muck. “Phantoms of Antiquity” and album-closer “Stripped of Flesh” are, in true Feral fashion, menacing, tantalizing earworms, sinking their envenomed worm fangs deep into the recesses of your half-rotted brain, demanding that you snap your head clear off your lousy neck. “Stripped of Flesh,” in particular, is absolutely frenzied, with David Nilsson’s vocals getting a good workout in its multiple registers, the buzzsaw riffs and screaming solos cycloning out of control, and Roger Markstrom’s drums piercing through the riff storm to keep you ever racing forward.
Today, we’re thrilled to bring you the album’s third single “Bound to the Dead.” Last year, I began my review of Made as Those Who Are No Longer Alive with a precis on the affinities between HM-2 death metal and hardcore, perhaps nowhere more notable (nor notorious) than legends Guns Up! lifting a legendary Entombed breakdown with no one the wiser except those wise ones who already knew. Luckily for us, Feral ain’t changin’ shit, and they’re still in the business of writing the kind of death mosh that’ll leave any pit just a Dismembered pile of arms windmilled off bodies and legs that two-stepped a little too viciously. “Bound to the Dead” rips open with an unholy D-beat before the band settles into the kind of up-tempo maelstrom of a groove that is a mosher’s delight. Before you know it, the 2:18 mark arrives, and we’re all more or less throwing TVs out the window and flipping over our furniture as we turn our living rooms into a sweaty basement show. But the band isn’t done. Not by a long shot. Quite possibly my favourite Feral song to date, “Bound to the Dead” is the kind of track that you think should end at what feels like its most logical spot but finds whole new life in its second half, taking the riffs you thought you knew and revising them just enough to keep them in line with the composition and yet making them fresh. 2:59 should be the end of the song, but a whole new riff—one of the nastiest on the album—gets slung at you out of nowhere, and we’re all of the sudden caught in another mosh. Or are we? The last 45 seconds of “Bound to the Dead” changes up so quickly and so deftly, you don’t know quite to do, exchanging different mosh riffs, blast riffs, and grooves with impeccable precision.
To be sure, this is precisely what the band wanted. As vocalist Dave Nilsson notes about the song,
“Bound to the Dead’ is one of the tracks from the album with the most twists and turns, it contains a slew of riffs that start and stop and change in tempo. The whole album has been recorded live together as a band in the studio, and this track is one of the songs that lends itself best to this method.
Twists, turns, slews of riffs, start-stop tempos… it’s all there! What’s more, that this was recorded live in studio is only further testament to the tireless effort and song-writing chops developed over nearly 20 years as a band. If this doesn’t get you dangerously stoked, I don’t know what will. So press play on “Bound to the Dead” and bind yourself to something heavy so you don’t fling yourself into the infinite at a moment’s notice once the unrelenting Carnage begins.
To Usurp the Thrones is out October 18th
on Transcending Obscurity Records
My god, look at that album art from
Grave’s Costin Chioreanu.
Don’t you just wanna buy all the merch?
Get me a tank!
