Death metal band Gruesome will return with “Silent Echoes,” its first new full-length recording in seven years, on June 6, 2025, via Relapse Records. Pre-order the album here, and watch the official music video for the new song “A Darkened Window” (directed by the Coin) below.
“’A Darkened Window’ was the perfect song to pair with the visuals of the Coin, who captured the existential despair of lyrics perfectly—a vision of modern existence where every human emotion can be commoditized and therefore must be groomed, filtered and corrected into something synthetic and horrifying,” the band said.
Celebrating over a decade as purveyors of old-school death metal inspired by Chuck Schuldiner and the many iterations of Death, the new album sees Gruesome transition away from the no-frills riff-fests of its “Savage Lands” and “Twisted Prayers” LPs, and shift toward a more musically advanced, nuanced form of extremity. “Silent Echoes” was written and recorded in the spirit of Death’s 1991 progressive death metal masterpiece, “Human.”
The prolonged gestation period between Gruesome albums was the combination of several factors, yet none more significant than the untimely and unexpected passing of Cynic and “Human”-era Death drummer Sean Reinert in 2020. Reinert, the best friend and mentor of Gruesome drummer Gus Rios, originally was slated to produce the album. Instead, Rios, alongside vocalist/guitarist Matt Harvey, lead guitarist Daniel Gonzalez and bassist Robin Mazen, turned “Silent Echoes” into a tribute to Reinert, whose influence and presence on the album is everywhere.
Jarrett Pritchard once again handled the production of “Silent Echoes.” A veteran of two previous Gruesome studio albums (and dozens of other respected extreme metal acts), Pritchard’s engineering and technical expertise played a crucial role in enabling the new album to recapture the feel of early 1990s death metal recorded at Tampa’s Morrisound Recording. Not only did Pritchard lean on the advice of Death producer Scott Burns, but Rios also used the same snare drum that Reinert did on Cynic’s “Focus.”
“Silent Echoes” track list:
1) Condemned Identity
2) A Darkened Window
3) Frailty
4) Shards
5) Silent Echoes
6) Voice Within yhe Void (Astral Ocean)
7) Fragments of Psyche
8) Reason Denied
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