Exclusive Track Premiere: Tormentor Tyrant’s “Cosmic Wild Hunt”
Lacerated shards of inhumanity.
On January 24, 2025, Finnish trio Tormentor Tyrant will release their first LP, Excessive Escalation of Cruelty, on Everlasting Spew. Building on the strength of the rip-roaring yet under-discussed 2022 self-titled EP, Excessive Escalation of Cruelty finds Tormentor Tyrant escalating the cruelty in ways that many folks, myself included, would call excessive. Featuring the talents of longtime collaborators S. Envenom and J. Carnage (Cataleptic, ex-Solothus) and M. Malignant (Corpsessed, Pestilent Hex), Tormentor Tyrant plant their flag firmly at the 50-yard line of the big house of Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, and Skeletal Remains. To be sure, this nothing short of “unrelenting evil violence [played] in the old way.”
To date, we’ve been treated to lead single “Capital in Pain,” a blistering two minutes of death metal malevolence. While the production is clearer than on Tormentor Tyrant, it’s dirty enough to evoke the scum-caked, grave-befouled demos of ’80s and ’90s death metal legends. There’s something refreshingly simple and straight-forward about “Capital in Pain”: the band moves martially through several up-tempo mangy riffs, creating a rising of urgency and terror, while M. barks, growls, and howls with baleful intent. Long hair is windmilling, air guitars are being shredded, various anti-Christian symbology is being carved into flesh, and sweaty barbaric pits are opening up like a hungry hellmouth to engulf the entire scene.
The calamity continues. Today, we’re stoked to bring you “Cosmic Wild Hunt,” the album’s second single. Clocking in at a meaty 4:25, “Cosmic Wild Hunt” marks only the third time Tormentor Tyrant has ventured into such territories. The band makes impressive use of the song’s runtime, dialing up a cavalcade of swirling, churning, and churlish riffs, all culminating in the mind-bending and time-warping second half of the song. Over the final two minutes, “Cosmic Wild Hunt” spirals up and down, climbing Escherian stairs to everywhere and nowhere. The band itself seems sucked ever deeper into an unrelenting perilous void, as a muffled solo begins haunting the chaos and M.’s vocals crescendo into a descent towards unbridled madness while the song’s spidering riffs continue apace. It is all done to great effect, sending the listener falling endlessly into an eternity of tyrannical torment, just another skinless, anonymous, hellish face lapping at an anguished nothingness with tongues of fiery flesh.
“Savage, grinding, furious and primordial,” Tormentor Tyrant are ushering us into an unruly 2025. Smash play on the song below.
Excessive Escalation of Cruelty arrives via Everlasting Spew on January 24.
Get it digitally or on CD or Halloween-orange cassettes. Vinyl due in late Spring!
