Blood Monolith – The Calling of Fire

Blood Monolith is a rising Death Metal force forged from the combined ferocity of members from Nails, Undeath, Ulthar, and Genocide Pact.

Conceived in 2023 by guitarist/vocalist Shelby Lermo (Nails, Ulthar) after his departure from Vastum, the project emerged in the Washington DC/Northern Virginia area with the intent to be uglier, stranger, and more aggressive than anything before.

Joined by guitarist Tommy Wall (Undeath), Lermo quickly completed the writing for their debut LP, later recruiting bassist Nolan (Genocide Pact, Shitstorm) and drummer Aidan Tydings-Lynch (Deliriant Nerve, Brain Tourniquet) to form a formidable line-up.

Drawing from a region steeped in corruption, violence, and a rebellious musical legacy, Blood Monolith channels its environment into a seething sonic assault. ‘The Calling of Fire’ summons both inner and outer rage to defy towering evil, striking with the precision and shock of a daylight assassination. Their distinctive concept and aesthetic set them far above the glut of formulaic Death Metal acts, blending a DIY ethic—rooted in their Punk and Grindcore backgrounds—with a feral Death Metal attack influenced by pioneers like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse as well as modern innovators such as Dead Congregation or even a Concrete Winds.

The sound hits like a precision-engineered wrecking ball — rooted in old‑school death metal brutality but delivered with a velocity and focus few peers can match. Eschewing cavernous, dissonant atmospherics, they go straight for velocitous brute force: blast‑beat barrages, rapid‑fire riffs, and guttural roars that rarely relent. The songwriting nods to the golden era — think Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Broken Hope — while weaving in Grindcore‑honed aggression from the members’ other projects.

Tracks like ‘Trepanation Worm’ and ‘Slaughter Garden’ channel classic riff-driven ferocity, while ceansing explodes with punk‑inflected D‑beats and martial breakdowns.

Blood Monolith can be dubbed a death metal supergroup whose manifesto is simple: filthy blastbeats, sputum-soaked roars/growls, and a guitar tone like an old circular saw chewing through cheap wood. And it works — a savage tribute to the genre’s golden days, when Chris Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse, Broken Hope and Deicide prowled the earth. From the very first blastbeat of ‘Trepanation Worm’ to the eerie sample at the end of ‘Pyroklesis’ — “in one of the countless billions of galaxies lies a medium-sized star and one of its satellites, a blue insignificant planet, is now dead” — the eight-track, sub‑30‑minute onslaught leaves no room to breathe.

Interestingly, only guitarist Tommy Wall plays anything resembling his main band’s style. The others — Lermo on vocals, Nolan on bass, and Tydings-Lynch on drums — bring abrasive, sludgy, Grindcore pedigree, which bleeds into the chaos. That influence keeps the album fresh despite its old‑school demeanor— as fresh as an exhumed corpse.

It ticks all the Death Metal boxes and meets all the requirements: relentless speed that only occasionally slows to a death march, sinister lyrics, and solos that garrote before retreating into darkness. You could blast the entire thing at 4 in the morning and it would end before the cops arrived — It would probably set off all alarms in the area.

‘The Calling of Fire’ is an exhilarating, ferocious war machine and a beast of an album. See for yourself.