SABREWULF – Mala Suerte / VINYL LP

Only the second album from the Texans, Mala Suerte feels a lot like Sabrewulf’s love-letter to Scandinavian Death Metal. That’s not to say the band are lazily picking up Entombed’s playbook and regurgitating tired ideas, rather they are using that classic sound as the starting point for an exploration of the genre.

For proof of the scope of the album, look no further than the closing and title track – a seven-and-a-half-minute epic journey through all the ideas laid out before. Mala Suerte’s beginning is atmospheric and ancient sounding, chanting is accompanied by unsettling guitar lines which foreshadow the grim vocals. It feels like Sabrewulf are pushing the boundaries here in a way they only intimate elsewhere on the record, their arrival at this point sees them having passed through some traditional death metal tropes: the huge low end of Bottom Dweller and Marked for Death, the big hooks and precise riffing of Ritual Skin, all flavoured by a modern twist of panic inducing beatdowns.