I covered Asphyx in Decibel #89 [Municipal Waste cover] and from that feature, I quickly realized that across Asphyx’s impressive, if somewhat under sung, discography, the Dutch outfit has the word ‘death’ in nearly half of its discography; 3 out of 8, to be more precise. Well, that fact wasn’t lost on drummer/songwriter Bob Bagchus, who said: “It’s coincidental, but it does fit the music. Maybe our next album will be called Deathdozer… But for this album’s title, we were thinking of Deathhammer or Doomhammer. Or do both — make a death-side and a doom-side. But we choose to only do Deathhammer, and that title covers it all.”
This isn’t a revelatory epiphany by yours truly, but the word ‘death’ thematically placed in so many album titles could be viewed in a few ways. A) Asphyx really like the word ‘death’. No problem there. Metal journalists liked and used the word ‘plethora’, well, a plethora of times. B) Asphyx lost their pocket thesaurus and Dictionary.com’s servers were strategically down at press time. Or C) Asphyx is reinforcing the fact that they’re straight up death metal. No ifs ands, or buts. What you hear is what you get. To be honest, we’d think it’d be fun if it was option B), but it’s absolutely option C) ’cause in my Decibel #89 feature Bagchus makes no bones about the, uh, plethora of fake death metal out there.
Because you’re awesome and you adore Asphyx oh Decibel faithful, we got the full album stream of Deathhammer. That’s right. Full album, deathbabies.
** Asphyx’s new album, Deathhammer, is out February 28th on Century Media Records. Order it HERE, or face the abyssal bottom of Martin van Drunen’s impressive maw. He eats un-supportive people, but you didn’t hear that from us.
