With 2020’s Stare Into Death and Be Still, New Zealand’s Ulcerate catapulted themselves to the forefront of death metal’s future. Naturally, the question of how on Earth anyone would follow up an album of that magnitude was on the minds of many, and Ulcerate took their time to answer this question. Four years later, we have Cutting the Throat of God, a work that continues to cement the band as a name that should be on the tip of every death metal lover’s tongue.

The apex of a nearly twenty year long career, Stare Into Death was not only a grand reinvention of the band themselves, but a complete paradigm shift for death metal as a whole. It was an album that showcased how technicality and intriguing songcraft can exist in ways that genuinely felt fresh and exciting; that I personally hadn’t felt this way about any death metal album in years. I spoke immense volumes of praise for Stare Into Death, calling it not only my album of the year but saying it would be a landmark album of the decade, and Cutting the Throat of God sees Ulcerate continuing to forge this new path for themselves. Whether fully leaning into the chaotic maelstrom, or sitting back at a mid-paced crawl, the atmosphere built on Cutting the Throat of God is unlike anything else in metal today. This time placing extra emphasis on the melodic aspects of their brand of death metal, avant-garde guitar riffs, thundering low end, and immaculate drum performance lock together to enhance the airy, eerie splendor of these compositions.

Opener “To Flow Through Ashen Hearts” kicks things off like no time has passed between albums at all, with guitarist Michael Hoggard setting the stage with the now signature dissonant, winding guitar passages that made Ulcerate’s previous work so special for me; there is no doubt that every member of this band is a world-class professional at their instruments (and Jaime Saint Merat should very much be considered extreme metal’s greatest drummer going right now), but having a background in playing guitar, I can’t help but continue to be mystified by the way Hoggard approaches his craft here. Much the same way that I feel about the Skarstad brothers of Yellow Eyes’ approach to black metal, there is something alien about the way these riffs are constructed, but the effect they produce is absolutely mind blowing. Far and away more interesting than anything else daring to call itself “technical” death metal, Ulcerate’s shift in songwriting tactics on Cutting the Throat brings these atmospheric elements to center stage, further amplifying the gap between themselves and their peers in terms of thoughtful songcraft.

Light and dark, heavy and lofty, layered and ambient, fast and slow, the union of opposites presented in Cutting the Throat of God is very much like the alchemical gold of yore, the transmutation of death metal into something grand through distilling it down into its base parts and re-working them into something more than their original sum. It is rare to find an album that leaves me completely at a loss as to what I could compare it to, an album that sounds so unlike anything else that is being released nowadays, and it is even more rare still for a band to give me this feeling twice in a row. Ulcerate are laying the foundations for a new future for extreme metal, and I only hope that people are wise enough to listen and follow in their path this time around.

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Cutting the Throat of God will be available June 14th on LP, CD, and digitally via Debemur Morti Productions. For more information on Ulcerate, visit the band’s official website.