REVIEW: LIVIDUS – Scarabaeus

May 19, 2026

I have a foggy memory of how I found Lividus, sometime maybe 4 or 5 years ago on the recommendation of a friend. There was (I think) a demo track up on a long since overhauled Bandcamp that had an interesting combination of Hammers of Misfortune-style clean singing and expressive, heavy metal-infused blackened riffing. I found it promising at the time but it was just a single song and clearly a demonstration of ideas, roughly produced and larval. They fell into the back alleys of my thoughts.

Two or so years later and a name I faintly remembered popped up when scouring Bandcamp for any obscurities I had forgotten in the early 2020’s deluge. Mystifying (and mouthy) cover art drew me in as did a logo I knew I had seen before, then the eclecticism of the music. A strange combo of jagged rhythm and moments of floating, spacey harmony, vindictive snarls and emphatic cleans, thrashing immediacy and articulate melodicism—a versatile sound built around various dualities. It turns out Uta Plotkin from doomsters Witch Mountain of all things was handling the vocal performance but what really caught my eye was Pierce Williams from the mighty Aenigmatum on drums, a band I have praised heavily.

The rest of the lineup was unfamiliar to me or otherwise not something I would associate with this particular kind of prog/black/death. Whatever skills transferred from one field to another did not detract at all as 2023’s Teratorns made clear, streamlining their proggier tendencies for a violent, forceful delivery that brought them closer to ’90s Swedish bands like Cromlech and Sacramentum. A three-year wait followed and in it, quite a bit of brainy death metal popped up but thankfully, Lividus wouldn’t be late to the party.

Scarabaeus can be summarized as a combination of both Lividus demos. You have the calculated eclecticism of Tetany and Teratorns’ visceral, go-for-the-jugular attack. More measured than the latter and pointedly direct than its predecessor, it’s a sleek 34-minute excursion into death metal territory not often explored. While they can be called a progressive band, they take a concise, fairly trimmed down approach to this broad sound. They have a touch of the staccato tech-thrash acrobatics prominent in bands like Haxprocess and Atvm delivered in a condensed manner that takes on a far more sombre tonality. It’s similarly melodic like the latter act, though in a moreso black metal-adjacent manner as was the norm for a lot of pre-Slaughter of the Soul takeover of melodeath like Unanimated and A Mind Confused. Viola appears here and there, lending itself well to the tragic atmosphere in tandem with a variety of floatier, wispier chords and harmonies.

Equally vital is Uta’s singing, taking an even more prominent form than before or even in the majority of death metal as a whole. This is to the extent of her smooth, resonant tone often leading the way more than Rob’s eclectic guitar work on more than one occasion. There are a lot of easy comparisons to make with Hammers of Misfortune’s The Bastard (not just vocally either) though Uta’s tone comes off as a bit thicker and fuller than Janis’ folksier sounding delivery. Her vicious snarls are no less satisfying, wild and accusatory, tending to work in tandem with Rob’s rigid thrashier patterns for greater propulsive effect. For those who wonder if death metal could work with mostly clean singing, this is your album.

We can’t forget about the rhythm section either. Pierce Williams is a busy man and he gave one of the genre’s finest drum performances back on Deconsecrate. Scarabaeus has flashes of his busy-bodied sound though like with Lividus in general, this is a far more trimmed down work that showcases a very direct approach from him. Quick flourishes of impressive technicality dot its landscape, playing moreso into immediacy and impact than density of notation. Connie Wang (also the band’s artist) isn’t a particularly flashy bassist but carries a lot of the weight behind their sound. Her bass is clear albeit not super high in the mix, selectively moving forward for harmonies at more dramatic moments of release and standout melodies. Even when Lividus is at its busiest, her bass is resonant enough to add quite a bit of flavor to even its relatively straightforward moments, overt flashiness exchanged for depth and weight.

As previously stated, Lividus can be seen as a progressive death metal band but they are far from Inanna or Epitaphe. A quick look at the runtimes makes this clear, with three songs maxing at 4 minutes and the rest typically a minute shorter. Rather than the structural sprawl of many of their compatriots, Lividus rely on a far more immediate and punchy approach. With Uta’s emphatic cleans, there’s an additional instrument that songs can be structured around that makes them somewhat reminiscent of ’80s classic metal in a sense, with her accusatory snarl being the perfect contrast to the powerful resolution of her singing.

This interplay of rhythm against melody in turn creates a reliable songwriting outline for the album and they can slot in a wide array of techniques. It’s an overtly emotive album, darkly dramatic in a cinematic fashion as they move between areas of jutting, bumpy rhythm and soaring exultation. It’s arguably the most streamlined they have been to date but there’s something to be said for how much mileage they can draw out of a relatively simple sense of juxtaposition.

In spite of or rather thanks to that, this strengthens their songwriting considerably compared to many others in this subgenre category. “Sealing The Wound” consistently barrages with pulsing bass and tumultuous rhythms always dotted with sharp inflections. Connie’s best basslines are present and moments of eerie, ringing chords let Uta’s foreboding intonation lurk in their shadow. “Viaticum” has shadows of Teratorns present in its refusal to let any riff get too comfortable, giving just enough space for soaring chorus-like harmonies breaking out of their prison. It’s almost the same effect as the rippier, speed/thrash-adjacent power metal bands, granted with a considerably more varied sense of dynamics, pacing, and a darker tonal sensibility.

“Sulphur” is mostly “doomy” with even its excursions into blasting coming off as a bit slower but its weightiness stays consistent throughout its runtime, ever descending in its gloom. Then the rising arpeggiated riff pops up, viola harmonizing alongside, and this instrumental segue is capped off with a tasteful bass solo. Final barrage “The Aftermath of the Flood” raises the bar even further, coming even closer than “Viaticum” to the visceral onslaught of Teratorns, working a tech thrash riff filled with upper-register fireworks through its straightforward single-string rhythm. It has particularly gorgeous “chorus”-like digressions with Uta’s voice gliding alongside long, jangling arpeggios in these ephemeral moments of tranquility. Its final minute is a fairly simple one with a touch of overlaid vocal layering underscored by background tremolos creating this grandiose swelling intensity for a few brief moments, quasi-symphonic in its character yet a powerful send off.

All of this puts Lividus in the upper crust of execution and ambition in contemporary death metal but it comes at a cost. I mentioned earlier it is a combination of the demos but I’ll specify that in practice, it often ends up as a compromise of sorts. The main shortcoming is the streamlining of a lot of the ideas present; simplifying the internal dynamics and obtuse note choices as well as jigsaw structures originally present makes the songs feel somewhat rushed and at times lacking some meat.

The band gets to the point a bit faster than usual but in the process, a portion of the mystery and how it would entrance the listener through its twisting paths of Tetany’s “Recreant” and “Thralldom” is sorely missed. There is more aggression present than the demo but it doesn’t hit the same manic highs as Teratorns either, a little too measured and we know they can be menacing lunatics as “Tis’forundal” and “Her Nacreous Eye” demonstrated on Teratorns. The viola is a particularly cool element but it’s hard not to want more of it. They’ve already nailed the idea of clean singing in death metal so it’s hard to not want them to also expand on that too – fleeting hints of what could be.

If the harshest criticism I can have of this band is that “what they already have in spades I want warehouses of,” that should tell you how well Lividus succeeded for a debut I feel I have waited too long for. Not just a new star of progressive/melodic/blackened death metal, Scarabaeus presents a variety of pathways forward in a time of both genre bloat and violent diversification, working a lot of concepts from death metal’s expansive history and more than a few outside of it. Yet it never comes off as entirely just a series of laboratory experiments with even the prominent singing and occasional viola naturally fleshing out a dynamic, acrobatic technical framework—so natural that it frequently feels as sweeping as a more bombastic band that might present itself as operatic or orchestral.

The lineup has since changed with an additional guitarist (ex-Ludicra) and a new drummer (ex-Silver Talon); with them, hopefully a massive expansion of their strengths is on the way. For fans of out-of-left-field death metal existing outside of the spheres of throwback, dissonant, and brutal, Lividus remains a flagship for the growing front of possibilities of a growing death metal spearhead.