Desaster were always one of the nastiest and most unrelenting bands to follow in the Teutonic footsteps of Kreator, Destruction and Sodom. Formed on the banks of the Rhine in the late 80s, they defied the trends of the following decade with brutally blackened albums like A Touch Of Medieval Darkness and Hellfire’s Dominion, before becoming even heavier in the 21st century.
In recent times, Desaster have appeared hellbent on being the most destructive band in thrash. 2016’s The Oath Of An Iron Ritual and 2021’s Churches Without Saints were both as heavy as it gets, with a big-budget, maximalist sound that skilfully mirrored the war-torn, blasphemous chaos of the band’s imagery and lyrics.
Four years on, the Germans have had a rethink. Kill All Idols is still a monstrous, deathly thrash album that promises to remove parts of the listener’s skull at its deafening leisure. But this time, Desaster have stripped everything down to its raw, sinewy essence, eschewing the polish and bolstered power of recent music in favour of something much uglier. Closer in spirit to untamed, Scandinavian black metal than to anything thrash-related, their 10th full-length is a sustained, sulphurous belch of bilious disdain, rooted in frozen forests and on bloody battlefields, but captured with primitive, unflinching honesty.
There is a huge contrast between the bloated horrorsof Fathomless Victory and the whip-quick fury of Throne Of Ecstasy, but the band’s mastery of this stuff is well documented, and their ability to hang a multitude of bodies from the same rafters has never been sharper. Rabid with dark metal intent on Towards Oblivion, dissonant and doomy on Stellar Remnant, and as punk-as-all-unholy-fuck on the blistering They Are The Law, Desaster’s return to bloody basics hits all the right notes in the Devil’s triad.
Kill All Idols is out this Friday, August 22, via Metal Blade
