After dropping not one, but two albums in 2024, including Graveworms, Cadavers, Coffins and Bones, Sweden’s Carnal Savagery elevated their status in the Swedish death metal ranks from being merely productive and OK, to a solid second-tier act.
Especially as the increased Autopsy stench was far more prevalent on the last few efforts amid the already stout and prominent and effective Dismember sound that they had perfected on the earlier efforts like 2023’s Worm Eaten or 2022’s Scent of Death; Both solid, but unspectacular albums.
But 2025s Crypt of Decay, their 7th album, as with the last effort, sees a perfect, improved balance between the melodic hack and slash tones of Dismember’s later classic mid-era albums like Hate Campaign and Death Metal such as the killer opener “Entangled in Barbed Wire”, “Amputation”, “Torn From the Grave”, and “Violent Lobotomy” (both of which recalls Dismember’s “Patrol 17”) and “After the Burial”, another killer track.
Then there are the more putrid sways, crawls, and scrawls of Autopsy in tracks like “Scalped and Flayed”, “Curse of the Catacomb”, “Crypt of Decay”, and “Deathmask”, which, as I mentioned, while it has always been around, is far more noticeable on the last two albums, and this one.
However, like the band’s discography, nothing here is a can’t-miss or game-changing, no matter how well-played and written it is, or how well the songs pay homage to the two clear influences mentioned. But still, another solid addition to the band’s quickly growing catalog.
