Metal
Prog On! Recordings · 1 September 2026
A proper death metal EP would have a two-minute track that comes in and gets out. “Lifeswallower” has none: the shortest, “Abandon The Body Of Rot”, runs four minutes and forty-nine seconds, and the other three go from five fifty-two to six thirty-two. Twenty-three minutes and twenty-five seconds in all, spread across four pieces that take their time. For a first outing that is a statement of intent: these four do not want you listening to the single.
Lifeswallower are four friends from the south of England who got together to play early death metal covers and ended up writing. The result comes out on 1 September on Prog On! Recordings. “Defy My World” opens with the low tuning, the distortion and the deep old-school growl, and somehow accommodates, without it being quite clear why, progressive stretches that lean more towards Devin Townsend than towards Entombed. “The Trees Hide Their Bodies” switches register: more current extreme metal, more technique and a higher harsh vocal laid over the top.
The second half heads for thrash. “Abandon The Body Of Rot” arrives with the aggressive pulse of that style’s early days and with the inheritance of the bands who have remade it in the UK, and “Compound Fears” closes moving between nervous riffs, ethereal guitar leads and vocals that rise before falling back into harsh harmony and rage. Calum Gibson, who reviewed it for DPRP, says that on paper the mixture should not work. It does, and it does because the four tracks are played with a precision that does not usually come with a band formed playing other people’s songs in a rehearsal room.
The seam shows too plainly. The EP is split down the middle far too cleanly — the first two tracks are death metal, the last two thrash — and at no point across the four tracks do the two bands living inside it sound at once: the melodic turn that opens “Compound Fears” onto somewhere else does not appear until the closer, when there is no record left to develop it in. Twenty-three minutes are enough to introduce yourself, not to settle anything, and that is exactly what they do.
Rating: 7.2/10
Text by Roger Estivill