Band names are nothing if not revealing. Coldplay, for example, is a Chaucerian synonym for ‘shite’, and Black Fucking Cancer … well let’s just say, if you’re at all unsure what path this conclave of crueltors is likely to lead you down, you’d be well advised to stop reading now. The follow-up to ‘Boundless Arcane Invokations’, 2019’s shockingly violent split with fellow Californians Gloam, ‘Procreate Inverse’ is black metal as its legendary progenitors originally envisaged; music so hateful, so extreme in its rejection of aestheticism that, to an outsider, it barely even qualifies as such. Not that we’d be here otherwise of course, but christ on a grim and frostbitten bike, this is SAVAGE. Like a pack of starving wolves, Black Fucking Cancer launch their ambush before you’ve even drawn breath, dragging you throat first back to their lair where a clique of black-cowled (psycho)pathologists stand unnervingly close to a dissection table brandishing hacksaws. Unrelenting in its viciousness, the hope-destroying onslaught of pure misanthropic fury BFC unleash may be kissing cousins with the work of their notorious forebears, but even Mayhem in their prime never surged this hard or with such malicious intent. A lightning-struck hypervortex of necrotising riff ravagement, tortured abyssal shrieks and skull-denting blast-beat fusillades, ‘Procreate Inverse’ is one of US black metal’s finest, Ed Sheeran-vaporising hours. The devil is most definitely in the detail.
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