Baest - Necro Sapiens (2021)

On album three, Baest’s brand of brash, Swedish-style death metal is sounding like a well-oiled machine, favouring rich melodic licks and boisterous d-beats over wall-to-wall blasts. Aside from the frantic Meathook Massacre, Necro Sapiens is the Danes’ least blasty yet, opting for a slower, more ominous approach on tracks like Genesis and Czar, like a doomier Grave with resonant, guttural vocals pitched somewhere between early Mikael Åkerfeldt and Domination-era David Vincent. Abattoir goes one step further, welding furious Dismember-esque tremolo to a slimy, stunted God Of Emptiness-style groove. Necro Sapiens isn’t life- changing, especially when compared to some of the more visionary records from the recent OSDM revival, but it’s a solid slab of brutish, no-nonsense riffery nonetheless.