Caligari Records announces October 31st as the international release date for Heteropsy’s debut album, Embalming, on CD and cassette tape formats: Embalming | HETEROPSY | Caligari Records
Formed in 2020, Japan’s Heteropsy are a quartet where two members do double-time in Frostvore. But whereas that band plays pure Swedish-style death metal, in Heteropsy do they play „mourning death metal“ – or, put another way, doom-death metal using a Boss HM-2 pedal with all knobs on MAX. A band of true maniacs playing music for other true maniacs, they state that their influences are „sometimes“ Dismember, Autopsy, Rippikoulu, Switzerland’s Sadness, and Sweden’s Naglfar: „We mixed our favorite death metal sounds, simmered them, sharpened them, stripped them bare, and then converted them into SAMURAI SWORD.“
Now, after four EPs and a split since their formation, Heteropsy make their full-length debut with Embalming. Indeed, it’s not difficult to hear their laid-bare-for-all-to-see mix of old-school Swedish death, melancholic vibes, and soulful edge; the album is first and foremost a DEATH METAL one before a doom one. But with „vague madness and sadness,“ Heteropsy crush and contort with a strangely unsettling and yet somehow addicting sort of magick, sounding like a lost relic of teenage Scandinavian metalheads blowing their minds circa 1995. Such is probably unsurprising for those well versed in how the Japanese locate a largely Western idiom, study it inside and out, and then process it – weirder and wilder than imaginable, and yet still slavishly reverent – emerging with something that’s both a love-letter to the form and a postmodern commentary on it. Or, you could simply submerge thyself in the muck of Embalming and allow the viscous fluids to rancidly wipe away such fancy words. Solemn and strange, Heteropsy make a grand entrance onto the world stage…
