Pull up a stool and grab a cold one. If you’ve been tracking the Pacific Northwest underground for the last decade, you already know these guys inside out from their days under the Kömmand moniker. They’ve traded in that old name for Hellslaught, but don’t sweat it, the rebranding hasn’t softened their edge one bit. Their debut under the new banner, ‘Violent Iconoclasm’, is a vicious slab of old-school Black/Thrash Metal that channels the ancient, unholy spirits of the mid-1980s without sounding like a tired imitation.
Stylistically, Hellslaught has pulled back slightly from the dense, suffocating weight of their older blackened Death Metal leanings, steering instead into a leaner, razor-sharp Black/Thrash Metal territory that owes a massive debt to the murky, primitive attack of early Bathory and the frantic mid-tempo energy of Teutonic Thrash Metal. The guitar tone here is delightfully filthy, packed with a biting, mid-range distortion that sounds like a rusted circular saw slicing through bone. Instead of opting for the sanitized, hyper-triggered click tracks that ruin so much modern Extreme Metal, the drumming technique relies on a loose, organic snare snap and a driving d-beat urgency that keeps the tempos threatening to careen entirely off the rails. The vocals tie the whole package together with a throat-shredding, reverb-soaked snarl that sounds less like a calculated studio performance and more like a desperate incantation bellowed across a damp basement rehearsal room.
What makes ‘Violent Iconoclasm’ work so well as a whole is its commitment to atmosphere over clinical execution. The songs have breathing room, often stretching beyond the typical runtime of your average Speed Metal rager. Take a track like ‘Liminal Bridges’, for instance. It showcases some genuinely ambitious arrangement choices, built around eerie tremolo-picked leads and unsettling tempo shifts that evoke the classic, underground malice of Germany’s Poison without losing that core, driving momentum. On the flip side of their sonic spectrum, ‘Mount Vvornth’ injects a contagious, Black ‘n’ Roll groove into the mix, proving the band can lay down a memorable headbanging hook just as easily as they can unleash a chaotic tempest of pure noise.
If there is a minor critique to lay down here, it’s that a few of the tracks across the mid-section tend to lock into similar rhythmic pacing, allowing the arrangements to coast on the same double-bass cadence for just a bit too long. A few sharper, more abrupt structural transitions or a sudden injection of chaotic whammy-bar abuse could have heightened the tension in those brief moments where the record threatens to plateau. Still, this is a minor grievance on an otherwise stellar offering. The production finds the exact sweet spot the underground thrives on: it’s raw enough to let the grime seep through your speakers, yet heavy enough to ensure the bass frequencies still punch you squarely in the gut. Hellslaught isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here; they’re just keeping it heavily greased with filth, and ‘Violent Iconoclasm’ proves they’re still absolute masters of the craft.
