Exclusive Track Premiere: Occulsed’s “Haze of Morbid Slicing”
Ample sacrifice.
On September 26, 2025, Atlanta’s Occulsed will release their second full-length Antegnosis on Everlasting Spew Records. Featuring Jared Moran (Dwelling Below, 500 other bands), Justin Stubbs (Encoffination, Father Befouled), and Kenneth Parker (Grst, Batrakos), Occulsed offer up a murk-mired and gutter-gorged brand of death metal with leanings towards Incantation and Funebrarum that was once described as “an unrefined compound of trog death, doom, and some war metal flaking around the edges.” This is pure death metal atavism—troglodytic and belligerent—a fearful reminder of primitive man’s ability to take “death seriously, [recognizing] it as the termination of life and [using] it to that end.”
Thus far, we have been mistreated to lead singles “Cudgel of Antimatter” and “Heinous Pulse.” Parker’s vocals gurgle and haunt each track, skulking with a grotesque pleasure around corners and ready to trample any unlucky bystander. Stubbs’ caustic tremolos combine with slovenly, twisting riffs as Moran’s steady kitwork keeps things lurking and lunging apace. The songs are short, punchy, given over to the ignominious and undignified of life. The lyrics tend towards the phantasmatic and immaterial, a blurriness that marks the liminality between the material and the intangible.
Today, we’re thrilled to bring you the third single and opening track “Haze of Morbid Slicing.” Here again we find our themes so elegantly arranged. There is the corporeal violence of the slice, of the dissecting or opening of flesh or time or reality, paired with the ghoulish and macabre, shrouded in a stinking miasma. The double-bass marshals us forward to we not know where. The guitars drop like a free-falling body from moments of high-flying frenzy. The vocals permeate every inch of your being. There is a persistent dissonance, not in riff structure but in mood and atmosphere. We are, of course, in the realm of Antegnosis, a time before mysticism and metaphysics. We are embodied enough, and we are without both illusions or illumination. “If we describe ourselves as living,” writes Adam Phillips, “then what we call rage might be the first stage of some process of enlightenment.” Or, perhaps, the stage of “the dispelling of a primal illusion.”
With “Haze of Morbid Slicing” and Antegnosis, we are the precipice of the un/civilized. It is a razor’s edge. Hit play below.
Antegnosis arrives September 26 via Everlasting Spew.
Get it digitally, on CD, or on a really sick bone-white tape.
