Blast Rites #2: Human Cull – To Weep For Unconquered Worlds Review

Way back, oh… like a month ago, when we here at the Last Rites Emporium Of Fine Musical Tastes were compiling our Most Anticipated Releases Of 2022 features, I was narrowing down my short list of contenders for that highly coveted honor, and this Human Cull record was in the running. So far in the running that I even started writing up a blurb on it. But thanks to this %&@!ing annoying pressing plant backlog and whatever other reasons, the release date for To Weep For Unconquered Worlds was murky. At the time, it was listed on Bandcamp as available on 1/1/22, which would’ve been after the feature ran, and it’s kinda silly to include a release that’s allegedly already out on your Most Anticipated, yes? So I waited…

But thankfully I didn’t have to wait very long.

Of course, the reason that To Weep For Unconquered Worlds was in my short list for Most Anticipated Of 2022 is an easy one. Over the course of a decade now, Human Cull has improved with each subsequent release, culminating in the ferocious death / grind of Revenant some 4 years ago. That album quite rightly made my 2018 year-end list, a positively smashing racket filled with jagged riffs and blunt-force aggression.

And I’m happy to say that my 20 additional days of patience were rewarded with the continuation of Human Cull’s upward trajectory, in quite a significant leap this time around. To Weep For Unconquered Worlds is, put very simply, a goddamned monster of a death / grind record, bursting at the seams with a wealth of dissonant riffs and hammering blasts. From the opening Doom soundbite, the title track swings into a clanging riff that could’ve been borrowed from Immolation, just a little over a minute of grinding perfection that leads perfectly into the skronky wonk of “Before” and beyond. “Instinct Enthroned” takes that swinging groove even further, with an ascending short riff that’s both crushing and instantly hooky, breaking up the churning grind. A updated version of “Familicide” (originally released in 2014 on The Persecuting Society) rips hard from tip to toe, and at two minutes in length, “Pyredancer” is both the longest and one of the strongest songs on these Unconquered Worlds, though it’s also the farthest the band indulges their dissonant death metal, and thus the farthest they tread from the grinding that they’re also excellent at. Lest any grinder think that Human Cull is going full-on death metal, however, “Habaeus Corpus” and “The Horror” come along and lays waste to everything in its path in less than sixty seconds flat.

Twenty songs in twenty-three minutes: To Weep For Unconquered Worlds wastes no time and takes no prisoners, which is exactly what any Human Cull fan (and any grindcore fan who isn’t already a Human Cull fan) could ever want. These Britons just keep getting better with every album, and even this early on in the year, I can all but guarantee seeing this one on my best-of-’22 list.

Now we just gotta get the damned pressing plants off their asses so I can get a real copy…