Welcome to Demo:listen, your weekly peek into the future of underground metal. Whether it’s death, black, doom, sludge, grind, thrash, heavy, speed, progressive, stoner, retro, post-, etc. we're here to bring you the latest demos from the newest bands. On this week’s Demo:listen, we bring you the exclusive debut of Greece’s Nefarious Spirit.
Nefarious Spirit don’t sound like your typical Hellenic black metal band. That’s probably obvious at first, but it took me at least three playthroughs of the Greek duo’s four song titular demo to realize as much because I kept losing myself in the riffs and the fiery and crackling howls of Drowned, Nefarious Spirit’s guitarist/bassist/vocalist. Fortunately my contact with the band was V, the drummer, so no mental energy was wasted on wondering about the drums. Rest assured they are real, just inhumanly performed. I said as much to V, and a lot more in praise of his drumming, and he humbly replied: “The drums [were] recorded at Ignite Studios.” While Drowned’s parts, e.g. the vocals, the bass, and the guitars, were engineered at Eleventh Tower, a studio owned and operated by Herald of Demonic Pestilence, guitarist of Embrace of Thorns. Ergo this demo is steeped in underground Greek black metal, even if it doesn’t sound like it at all.
V admits: “Our demo doesn’t have a ‘Greek sound’ and you won’t find influences from the Greek black metal scene.” Sure he and Drowned “grew up listening to bands like Zemial, Rotting Christ, Necromantia (best demo ever recorded from a Greek band), Varathron, Zephyrous, Thou Art Lord,” but theirs is a black metal without borders. “I personally had in my mind bands like Ostots, Owl’s Blood, Cosmic Church, Bekëth Nexëhmü,” V says, “but the result is something different that has its own character.”
Although V and Drowned once played in Impure Worship together, Nefarious Spirit has very little resemblance to that band either. An acumen for malign melody conducts these tracks that Impure Worship’s barbarity has little time for. And they’re short, too, these Nefarious Spirit tracks—for black metal, at least. All of the songs move toward a climactic denouement, a sort of all-encompassing apotheosis, but I hesitate to call any one of these songs or riffs "epic." Nefarious Spirit's sound is too hermetic and misanthropic for that word.
The release of Nefarious Spirit’s demo has been a long time coming. The band first revealed themselves this summer past, only to fall silent until about a fortnight ago when Underground Soundscapes (a new but already proven tape label out of Greece) announced that they would release the band’s eponymous debut in the form of 50 tapes. And it was decided that on this day, the second of December in the two thousand and sixteenth year of this so-called common era, Nefarious Spirit would be released upon the world. So get your copy while you still can. But if you miss out, don’t sweat. According to V, Kill Yourself Prod will soon release vinyl and CD versions.
You heard it here first on Demo:listen. Check this space next and every Friday for promising new metal.
