DEMISER
Through The Gate Eternal
BORIS
US black/thrash debutants break out from the pack
“Turning the Bible Belt into the Bullet Belt”, this South Carolina quintet’s debut LP manages to transcend the weight of their influences to serve up 34 effortlessly entertaining minutes of black thrashing metal to make the dead headbang. It even makes a virtue of a surgically scrubbed sound that initially seems all wrong. Songs like magisterial closer Warfuck Demon Lust, which had an appropriately grimy, cryptic basement aura on 2018’s Surrender To Sin demo tape, may at first sound offputtingly clinical. Then you notice that for all the debt that Demiser still owe to rough and raw 80s records by Sodom, Venom, Destruction and The Exploited, …Eternal is stacked with glittering earworms and gleefully shot through with the guitar-hero exuberance of beautifully named axeman Gravepisser, glazing their raucous 80s thrash/punk roots with late 90s Gothenburg pop savvy.