Last we heard from Vermintide was 2022 and the band had released their debut EP, Meaningless Convulsions, the year prior. The band's budding brand of Israeli slamming death-grind was just congealing as was the band's line-up. Meaningless Convulsions was an admirable and propelling first entry. You can read my review of that release here. Since then the band has released two full-length albums—2023's Ashamed Of My Species and early 2024's Virus Pedigree.
Ashamed Of My Species saw Vermintide as a more cultivated and developed death-grind act. This sophomore release was not only a furtherance in musicianship, but it brandished an openly aggressive and feral disposition. The guitarwork on the album was an engaged whirlwind of furious churns and scribbling tremolos. There appeared to be both a denser layering of the guitar in the mix as well as more comfortability behind the playing. The same could be said for the drumming and vocal performances, frankly. I was honestly surprised at the instantaneous ferocity of the opening track, "How Dare You?" and the subsequent songs thereafter.
Much of the Meaningless Convulsions review was spent with me trying to decipher what exactly slam metal actually was. (I watched more than a few educational videos.) But when it came to Ashamed Of My Species, when things did slow down, especially in the second act, I just felt like it was plain and simple brutal death metal. Maybe even a groove and doom metal vibe as well.
Overall, the cohesion of the fledgling band and the boost to production made Ashamed Of My Species a respectable first full-length, not to mention the band ends the album with both a Napalm Death and a Magrudergrind cover. The latter of which you rarely see outside of YouTube "Bridge Burner" tutorials.
This year's Virus Pedigree full-length only compounds the band's above stated accolades and after a lineup change, finds the band at their strongest. Vermintide's vicious onslaught of pounding death-grind is sharp, quick and to the point here. This latest release boasts an even more well-balanced and polished production that highly compliments the instrumentation as well as couples the heavy and the high. You can't really ask for more out of the album's mix.
The guitar playing is a roaring tidal wave of HM-2-esque distortion drenched gnashing. It still has that metal kink, yet drives with a more single focus. There's less of those warbled scribbles and more of a whipping torrent. There are still some through lines that call back all the way to the Meaningless Convulsions days, like the band's tell-tale signature writing structures, i.e., the ascending and descending of those trumpeting leads. Likewise, the band's slam—or as I would naively oversimplify it as, deathcore— and death-grind cocktail still has that undercurrent of some 90's era groove metal.
I feel that the track "They Told Me I Did It" emphasizes that groove metal notion and it bares a familiar resemblance to White Zombie's "Ratfinks, Suicide Tanks And Cannibal Girls" from the Beavis and Butt-Head Do America soundtrack. It seems to hit a lot of the same beats, in my opinion, yet obviously plays as a grindcore song instead of some noise rock turned toxic cult alt-metal, pre-2000's throwback. Or maybe it's just me.
Like the guitar, Vermintide's drums have trimmed away some of the fat in this leaner take on the band's songwriting. The drumming mostly pivots between fast snare hammerings and even faster blast beats. While Virus Pedigree's drumwork is markedly improved and bereft of that original debut snare tone, it still carries the same established drumming style of mid-tempo kick drum trots, bouncing two-step beats and stuttering blast beats. And like Meaningless Convulsions, I'm assuming the drums here are programmed in lieu of an actual drummer. A fact that the casual listener will undoubtedly never notice. It's a generally consistent style that has become somewhat of a signature sound throughout Vermintide's discography.
The slower, death metal drenched breakdowns of Ashamed Of My Species are not as plentiful here in Virus Pedigree, but the band does play around with pacing. There are a lot of quick tempo changes and breaks which could support an argument towards the band's style on the new album being of the stop-and-go grind variety—almost.
Much can obviously be said about Vermintide's growth and evolving sound, but my favorite, by far, is the inclusion of the band's new bassist on Virus Pedigree. Their talents are best exemplified with the track, "The Consumer Automaton." The track's punctuated introduction is broken up by another ascending/descending riff, only this time in the form of an extremely pleasing bass solo. The bassline is not overly complicated, but is used to great effect, especially considering the scarcity of the bass within the genre itself. The riff just sounds fun—fun to hear and fun to play. These bass asides dot the album sporadically and add so much to the enjoyment of the record. The bass has a really great tone that is a cleaner, brighter sound. It's a tone that sounds like a cross between skate punk and prog rock. The bright slinkiness coupled with the higher than average incorporation of the bass guitar within the mix really sets this aspect of Vermintide above the rest. I also noticed a warmer, lunging bass sound throughout the album that consists of slides up and down the fretboard. These always remind me of the song "The Gael." Again, fun to hear and fun to play. The bass on"The Consumer Automaton" makes the album for me.
The appeal of Vermintide is their unorthodox approach to grindcore. The band's evolution from a one man solo project to a group of hired mercenaries presents its own unique challenges: they have guitar riffs written by a non-guitarist and filtered through an actual guitarist, drums without a drummer, but written by a drummer, on top of the fact that the band members seemingly come from non-grindcore backgrounds. Yet, they are continuously and quickly improving themselves and Virus Pedigree could easily hold its own with any given grindcore album. I enjoy how the aggression and musicianship have escalated in tandem on Virus Pedigree.
Watching Vermintide's metaphorical musical sutures fuse in practically real time is an exciting process to watch and be a part of. I feel like the "slam" moniker may no longer apply, especially when it comes to Virus Pedigree. From what I think I know about slam metal, the band seems to have shed any explicit connections and tends to lean towards a general death metal or deathcore. I would say that this is just straight death-grind.
Virus Pedigree is the best offering to date from Vermintide. With the band improving in both their sound and skill as well as leaning more and more into grindcore, it's easy to understand why. With no offense to the band, the album really shines a light on how early Meaningless Convulsions really was. Yet, that is a comparison true of most bands, I suppose. This also means that given the pattern, we can expect the next iteration to be even more exceptional by comparison.
P.S. Virus Pedigree ends with a gridcore rendition of The Exploited's "Daily News." This is possibly one of the best punk-to-grindcore covers I've heard in a while. It's a cover after my own junior high school heart. It just shows that you have to make these covers your own. It's not as simple as a 1:1 ratio of a punk song with the addition of blast beats. Something to keep in mind for a lot of these grindcore cover tribute albums cropping up lately.
FFO: Convulsions, Squash Bowels, Napalm Death
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