GRAVE INFESTATION - Carnage Gathers (Review)

Written by: Blackie Skulless
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It’s been a heavy year for death metal so far, with no shortage in strong contenders for a favorite. We may only be just touching the halfway point of 2025, but Canada’s Grave Infestation is looking like they could take that torch pretty early on. The British Columbian outfit has been around since 2018, crafting a horrendous and loose brand of death metal under a loud atmosphere. The latest release, Carnage Gathers, is no exception, being the one that truly gathered my attention.

Redundant as it seems to describe death metal as “loud,” I say this because every role in the makeup has such a mighty presence, rumbling its otherwise tight structures into loosening its fasteners. Rough and rocky rhythms that echo off one another backed by ferocious drum blasts create a cavernous strike that rarely uses it in the doom/death sense, but prefers to stick to breakneck-speeds. If that isn’t enough, the vocals erupt in a howling-meets-growling way that cakes on another layer of atmosphere, rendering a feeling of suffocating in a coal mine. The only time this really lets up is when a screeching guitar lead takes the forefront, feeling like a proverbial cry for help under a relentless avalanche that one can’t escape, due to the wall of sound the thick riffs create with the drumming.

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Perhaps it sounds like there’s only one real trick to the show, but it’s a damn good one, and one that still possesses striking moments. “Ritualized Autopsy” cranks out one of the fiercest solos mixed into a backbreaking crawl at a slower tempo, where the following “Inhuman Remains” sneaks in mild, unsettling melodies atop buzzing, monotoned passages. Perhaps the title track cracks the whip the hardest, being the shortest helping of fast blows one after another, even giving the bass a stronger swing. In the opposite sense, full-on doom-laced passage may be rare, but “Black Widow” sports a center so hot it had no choice but to melt into an oozing run of molten steel. The sheer lack of structure or repetition in layout for a lot of these songs makes Carnage Gathers one of those records that’s easier to take in as a whole rather than separate song to song.
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At barely forty minutes, these eight tracks serve up death metal in some of its heaviest and unforgiving forms. Shying clear from the ugly or gross side of the genre, it opts instead for extreme weight that works in tastes of fear and abandonment. Johnny Cash once made a record about the harsh conditions of the coal miner in the early 1960s. In 2025, Grave Infestation made one that feels like harsh mining conditions, as they bring your life to an abrupt end, with hallucinations of a terrorizing figure as depicted on the album art. God, do I love when the music sounds like the album art looks.

Grave Infestation - Carnage Gathers was released Feb. 28th, 2025 via Dark Descent. Find it here!

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Grave Infestation can be found on Bandcamp
Cover Art by: Misanthropic Art