Degenerates, rejoice: Deathgrave is back. The San Jose sickos have been mostly dormant since 2018’s searing So Real It’s Now, but on April 14, they’ll return with It’s Only Midnight, another warped collection of razor-sharp deathgrind tunes. The album marks guitarist Greg Wilkinson’s first new release since teaming up with Chris Reifert in both Autopsy and Static Abyss last year, and you can hear a little bit of those bands in the chunky, off-kilter riffing here. Still, Deathgrave is its own bizarre, darkly funny thing entirely. It’s great to have them back in our lives.
The first taste of It’s Only Midnight comes in the form of “Your Rulers Are Here,” which delivers the band’s signature punked-out death metal lurch and gross-out gallows humor in spades. Decibel is premiering the song and its truly insane The Thing-meets-Trees Lounge video. Check out the Douglas Lawlor-directed clip below and read a statement on it from vocalist Andre Cornejo.
“I really enjoy old, tucked away neighborhood bars. When one walks into one of these watering holes and there’s four people that might as well be statues staring straight into glasses creaking their necks to shoot confused wide-eyed glare at the unfamiliar face fills me with an exciting and uncomfortable joy. I will sit down and order a whiskey covered in decades of dust and start to imagine the stories of local patrons, eavesdropping on their sluggish drunken conversations while buried in a book. ‘Your Rulers Are Here’ is my homage to all of these reclusive dives and the eccentric communities that find themselves stumbling in and out of them on a daily basis. The lyrics convey that a Lovecraftian cosmic monstrosity has infiltrated a small bar, infecting the libations with alien biological goop to enslave the local community through alcoholism that leads to sickness in which these malevolent creatures feed upon.”
Preorder It’s Only Midnight, out April 14 on Tankcrimes on LP and CD.
