DYING FETUS & SANGUISUGABOGG

DYING FETUS established a reputation for uncompromising integrity with a slew of classic albums and today rides a resurgence of respect and esteem with a new generation. As Revolver Magazine wrote upon the release of their first new material since 2017’s Wrong One To Fuck With: “Their unique sound has always straddled the line between extreme metal instrumentation and heavy hardcore chugginess, and right now, they’re extremely well-regarded by many of today’s heavy-hitting hardcore acts, as well as their fair share of death metal and deathcore up-and-comers.”

Recorded in Baltimore with longtime producer Steve Wright (Future Islands) and mixed by Mark Lewis (Cannibal Corpse), Make Them Beg For Death contains every Dying Fetus hallmark. The veteran death metal band’s ninth album is fast, intense, and brimming with unstoppable grooves.

Monstrous riffs, blast beats, unstoppable hooks, and earth-moving grooves define their catalog. The Black Dahlia Murder, Suicide Silence, and Whitechapel co-headlined tours with Dying Fetus in recent years, a testament to the veteran band’s continued relevance and respect in the genre.

Decibel Magazine inducted the band’s zeitgeist third album, Destroy the Opposition (2000), into their prestigious Hall Of Fame, next to genre-defining classics from the likes of Metallica and Slayer. Metal Injection hailed Wrong One to Fuck With as a “menacing motherfucker.” The band continually refines its unique take on death, grind, and hardcore with a combination of virtuosity and ferocity, inescapably catchy hooks and punishing breakdowns, and a lack of pretension.

“We put our own twist on death metal,” explains co-vocalist/guitarist John Gallagher, who co-founded the group in 1991. “We were like most bands, starting in the garage, drinking beer, having a little fun on the weekend, finding the right amps through trial and error. We blended aspects of bands we liked—Suffocation, Obituary, Deicide, and Cannibal Corpse, among others; the dual vocal approach of Carcass—and made them our own. ‘Let’s make it moshy, let’s make it slammy.’”

Surprisingly, the band took a few cues from early Agnostic Front and Madball and even a bit of Rage Against the Machine, whose debut album arrived in 1992. “I wanted to take some of that groove and put it into death metal,” Gallagher says. Internal Bleeding, arguably the first band to do “all slam, all the time,” was another influence; their native New York was just a few hours away from the Dying Fetus home base in Maryland. “That whole New York scene really inspired us. It was a big part of our development, as all of our bands were continually influenced by each other.”

Eschewing leather and spikes in favor of T-shirts and shorts, the “street-level” look of Dying Fetus ruffled some feathers in elitist metal circles but helped the music cross over to other scenes. That no-frills approach is the norm today; some death metal bands even sell branded basketball shorts.

Early demos and a pair of albums on smaller labels led to the landmark release of Destroy the Opposition. The high-speed Stop at Nothing (2003) introduced bassist Sean Beasley, who began sharing vocal duties with Gallagher on the excessively brutal War of Attrition (2007).

Drummer Trey Williams rounded out the modern, definitive Dying Fetus lineup beginning with the tech-metal masterpiece Descend into Depravity (2009). “Outstanding technical bands like Necrophagist were out at that time,” Beasley remembers. “I wrote songs with like 25 riffs in them.”

While no less technically proficient, Reign Supreme (2012) pushed the band’s groovier side back to the forefront. (“Second Skin” even appeared in an episode of South Park.) Five years later, “Dying Fetus hit the mark again” (Exclaim!) with the ruthless and crushing Wrong One to Fuck With.

Hatebreed, As I Lay Dying, Knocked Loose, GWAR, Morbid Angel, and Six Feet Under are just a few bands who’ve taken Dying Fetus on tour over the years. In 2014, the fan-driven and tongue-in-cheek “What About Dying Fetus?” hashtag campaign earned them a mainstage spot at the UK’s Download Festival, playing before the likes of Bring Me the Horizon, Fall Out Boy, and Linkin Park.

Make Them Beg For Death, set for release in 2023, delivers savage beatdowns equally designed to pulverize and mesmerize. “It follows on from where Wrong One to Fuck With left off,” Williams promises. “We don’t need to participate in the technical death metal arms race. We’ve got the big guns, and we’ve proven that. It’s all about pointing them in the right direction, so to speak.”

To the men of Dying Fetus, the mission is straightforward. “The philosophy is the same now as it was when the band started,” Gallagher confirms. “To write catchy riffs and to make it memorable. Whatever style of music you’re doing, make it something people want to hear repeatedly.”

Shat out of hell, indeed. That’s the sonic stench that permeates the epically unpronounceable, utterly indecipherable, and altogether uncompromising sound of Ohio’s notorious gore-merchants, SANGUISUGABOGG. Homicidal Ecstasy, the ‘Bogg’s second Century Media platter of splatter, isn’t merely a return to the “down-tuned drug death” that defined 2021’s Tortured Whole. It’s the fluid-streaked byproduct of a band that hit the road like crazed serial killers and never looked back, plunging deeper into a celebration of Mortician-worshiping brutal death metal sounds and splatter classics like Dead Alive. They also became a formidable live and studio force in the process.

“Everything became more legit,” states vocalist Devin Swank. Indeed, SANGUISUGABOGG has emerged from the pandemic, toured the US and Europe, and with Homicidal Ecstasy made a record that will go down as a benchmark for modern death metal. They’re no longer that band of meme-inspiring miscreants. “The musicianship, the production, the lyrics—which delve much more into horror and body horror—are more thought-out,” says Devin. “It’s not just a bunch of dick and fart jokes.”

Make no mistake—the ‘Bogg hasn’t gone soft. From the album’s gurgling opener, “Black Market Vasectomy,” Homicidal Ecstasy is very much SANGUISUGABOGG. It maintains the queasiness-inducing feel of 2019’s debut EP, Pornographic Seizures, while serving up a bloody dose of refined riffage. “Face Ripped Off,” which features Jesus Piece frontman Aaron Heard testing the lows of his throat, is as bowel-rattling as it gets, while tracks like the manic “Skin Cushion” accelerate, swerve, and then smash the senses courtesy of drummer Cody Davidson’s almost jazz-like rhythms.

“After lockdown, once the restrictions from COVID lifted, we were hungry not just to tour but to start writing again,” recalls Devin. “Ced [Davis] had moved from bass to guitar, and Drew [Arnold] also started playing guitar. The feeling was the sky’s the limit. That’s when we started writing and adding new songs like ‘Necrosexual Deviant’ to the set—and starting to see the new songs getting better reactions than songs from the previous two records.”

It was Davidson who once again helmed production duties for Homicidal Ecstasy. Heading from tour to the studio, SANGUISUGABOGG blasted through a set of road-tested songs before handing off mixing duties to Converge guitarist and vaunted studio veteran Kurt Ballou (High on Fire, Nails) at God City Studios in Salem, Massachusetts. “I would call that our ‘come to Jesus’ moment,” says Devin. “We’re huge fans of Kurt’s music and love the sound of his records. We wanted to work with him long before we were signed to Century Media, and what we got back exceeded our expectations. He took SANGUISUGABOGG and made it sound like us on steroids.”

SANGUISUGABOGG’s bloody rise—their name, in fact, is an anagram for “Bloody Toilet”—was as unexpected to the underground death metal scene as it was for the ‘Bogg. After releasing Pornographic Seizures in 2019 on the cult Maggot Stomp label, the foursome quickly won fans for their blasts of sludgy, determined riffing, tongue-severed-from-cheek gross-out humor, and nods to hardcore and ’90s East Coast death metal. “The logo definitely helped,” smirks Devin. “It’s the Nike swoosh of death metal!” Hitting the road with the likes of Creeping Death, Frozen Soul, and Vomit Forth, SANGUISUGABOGG received a pile of plaudits, including BrooklynVegan placing them on a Most Anticipated Albums list next to genre titans like Carcass. “We got mentioned on NPR shortly after we dropped the first track off our EP!” says Swank, still in disbelief. “SANGUISUGABOGG was literally something that came together out of thin air. The first time we got together, we wrote and recorded our first four songs. Something was in the air.”

In the face of COVID-19 and a worldwide shutdown, the ‘Bogg got down to business. Signing to Century Media, they recorded Tortured Whole and hit the road as the locked-down world began to reopen. Later that year, they teamed with the infamous Troma Films collective for two video clips that featured battling penis monsters, boner implants, and Troma’s own Sgt. Kabukiman.

The 2021 US “Frozen Whole” tour with longtime friends and labelmates Frozen Soul cemented SANGUISUGABOGG as standard-bearers for death metal’s next generation. “It definitely felt like the torch was being passed from that Swedish sound—an homage to early ’90s death metal—to a more brutal, direct approach with influences like Suffocation and Pyrexia,” says Devin. “Everything is cyclical. We made it even more direct, bouncy, and grimy.” Tours with Nile, Terror, The Acacia Strain, and a run of dates as main support to Cannibal Corpse, leading into Decibel Magazine’s Metal & Beer Fest in Philadelphia, solidified SANGUISUGABOGG as a force in their own right. “It still blows my mind that bands like Terror or Cannibal Corpse—bands that are legends to me, that I’ve been listening to for years—would even think to take us on the road,” marvels Devin. “It’s even more mind-blowing to me that their fans would get off on what we do.”

Homicidal Ecstasy isn’t merely a musical maturation for the gore-obsessed members of the ‘Bogg. While Swank’s lyric writing sessions are still “fueled on coffee with a horror movie playing in the background,” this isn’t exclusively the gross-out show of SANGUISUGABOGG past. “It goes deeper this time, into the psycho-sexual, body-horror—why what some people see as perverse or fetishistic can also be perfectly normal,” says Devin. “There’s even a song called ‘Mortal Admonishment’ where I talk about how I deal with death. I wanted to write a song about my grandmother and how I got the news about her cancer and how I internalized it. It’s standard in death metal to talk about death, but who has talked about the grieving process?”

“It’s kind of an homage to real life,” says the frontman. “When shit hits the fan, no one’s really safe.”

Reconstituted, regurgitated, and reenergized, SANGUISUGABOGG walks among us. Let the Homicidal Ecstasy begin.

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