Review: Final Resting Place – Third World Tribunal

July 17, 2026

Baptized in sub-bass, this is a rough debut

All other things equal, Final Resting Place is a band with a love and respect for brutal death metal—something I can respect and empathize with. Styling themselves after late-’90s/early-2000s New York bands like Entorturement and 420, as well as the beatdown hardcore groups that share DNA, FRP has become a group with formidable hype. The EPs from the past two years (Prelude to Extinction and Bound by Affliction) were displays of great potential from a band who aimed to recreate the groovy, tough guy origins of slam. This framework had been successfully laid, setting up for a first full-length album. The debut LP is a make-or-break moment for every band from brutal death metal to dream pop. Any chud with the right equipment can churn out a solid demo or EP that grabs the attention of the (particularly) unwashed masses, but can said chud stick the landing? A misstep on record number one is a surefire way to leave lasting negative impressions on your group (see fellow hardcore-turned-meathead-death group Sanguisugabogg), ones that linger even after redemption. For this reason, I am left completely confused by the drop in quality on Third World Tribunal and its most glaringly-obvious pitfall: the production.

Those classic brutal death metal demos like Afterbirth‘s Psychopathic Embryotomy and Necrocide‘s Vomit Forth Blood carry with them rough, blunt mixes with little to no clarity or high fidelity. This style, born from technological and budgetary restrictions, grew to define much of the genre’s ethos and tropes, meaning the idea of a group aiming to recreate that sound in their music is hardly novel or shocking. It’s just that, on Third World Tribunal, this results in a record that sounds distractingly murky. Most of the space in the mix is being taken up by bass tones and feedback, washing everything out in muddy frequencies. This results in a record that’s somewhere between “hearing a band from outside of the venue” and “the musical equivalent of how it feels to throw a punch in a dream” in terms of sound, which ends up incredibly intrusive and distracting. Beyond that, all else gets swallowed by the all-consuming maw of the low end.

This is a shame, because it’s not as if Final Resting Place completely forgot how to write songs. While being somewhat backloaded, the tracklist of Third World Tribunal contains moments of decent rhythms and semi-gratifying grooves (the end of “Reconstructing Avalon,” the main riff on “Ancient Carnage,” the breakdown on “Terminal Lucidity,” etc.). Similarly, the band’s chemistry together is still strong and, aesthetically, you can still see that endearing appreciation for the boneheaded classics, yet the befuddling choices seep into almost every aspect of this record. The iconic slam snare tone is tuned so high that it begins to resemble a wood block, the rest of the drum kit (other than the kick) sounds like it’s drowning in a sea of low-register frequencies, the bass and guitar blend together into death metal’s answer to homogenized meat products, and only the howling gutturals are able to escape the rest of the deluge of musical sludge (and not in the Acid Bath sense).

It’s all enough to leave me more so confused than disappointed. Forgive the trope, but I genuinely did have to listen to a few other songs to make sure the problem wasn’t with my equipment. I just really couldn’t believe what I was hearing—wouldn’t it make more sense to have the EPs sound like blown-out car speakers and have the major first record be tighter and remotely discernible? I worry that this review makes it seem like Third World Tribune ran me through its pleb filter, so I tried to listen past the sound palette. What I found was a record with far less nuanced writing than Prelude to Extinction that fails to excite in the same fashion as Bound By Affliction. While I wouldn’t say my confidence in Final Resting Place is completely gone, I’m left contemplating their choices and feeling like this new record was a missed opportunity for the group to really nail the follow-through. What we do receive is an album that betrays the group’s talents and makes them look like novices at a genre we know they can hold their own in, if not excel. Disappointing, to say the least.