Horrifier Horrid Resurrection

Deep from the cold and dark cemeteries of Oslo, a bellowing cry rings out from a mausoleum. A chill runs down your spine, a cold sweat forms on your brow. Fearing for your life you’re greeted by four grim and waling ghouls…Horrifier. Read onward at your own peril, for the time has come to witness the Horrid Resurrection. OK…now that we’ve gotten the Hammer Horror introduction out of the way (can you blame us?) we can dive into their debut album.

Right out of the gate, it’s abundantly clear who Horrifier has drawn inspiration from. From the opening salvo of “Chainsaw Death” you’re pummeled by a blistering, festering miasma of influences from Autopsy, Repulsion and early Entombed. While the band pays their respects to those bands in full, Horrifier makes their own unique sound both audible and more impressively, palpable throughout the album. The band masterfully flows between all out speedy mayhem and crushingly heavy, brooding riffs. They do this with great skill and quite convincingly, which is no small feat for a band that’s only two years old.

From track to track the band conjure up quite a hellscape, teeming with gore, bile and violence. Sure, the music and lyrical themes throughout the record may not be anything revolutionary or genre-breaking, but when you listen to “Hooks in Flesh” you are immediately transported to a dank, dark room whilst being subjected to torture much to the delight of your four, menacing captors.

Horrifier doesn’t re-write the book on death metal, and they don’t mean to it seems. Instead, the band leans on the strength of their songwriting chops to really bury their listeners with their take on the familiar. Each song tends to grow more frightening lyrically as the album continue, not unlike a fine, vintage Hammer Horror flick, steadily getting better (or worse depending on how you watch b-horror) until the very end.

The production of Horrid Resurrection would fit in well next to any of the early classics of death metal. The drums are forward in the mix, but not brittle or overly bright. The bass has a nefariously delightful grit to it that allows the basslines to pop out some in certain spots which serves as an excellent counter point to the harsher mid-range of the guitars.

Reverb is used heavily but doesn’t drench the mix, though it’s most noticeably effective on the vocals helping them to sound even more haunting. The record has a good balance to it, allowing the tremolo-pick riffs to really scathe and bite and give breathing room to the slower passages of the tracks.

Where Horrifier really shines though is their song arranging. Like any good/bad b-horror movie, the plot should almost be secondary to the timing of the scares, kills and screams. You could have the scariest villain ever in your movie, but if they don’t show up and slaughter the helpless teenagers at the right time, the suspense is lost, and the movie ruined. 

Horrifier stands out from their contemporaries with their excellent pacing of each song as well as understanding track order and delivering each gruesome scene exactly when they need to, closing with the masterfully crafted title track “Horrid Resurrection”.

Bottom Line: Horrifier shows plenty of promise on their debut LP and where similar bands (Condor, Sepulcher, or Obliteration) tend to miss the mark with pacing and impact, Horrifier have their sights zeroed in. Some bands just write about total mutilation and terror, but Horrifier does so with aplomb. This is a band worth keeping an eye as they will surely only continue to harness the powers of evil and darkness with subsequent releases we’re sure.