Hellwalker – Hellwalker Review

Hellwalker is one of those entirely random, spot ’em on Bandcamp finds for me—which is to say, the best of finds. As is true for most people, life pulls me away from that kind of adventuring most of the time. But late one Sunday evening, as I toiled on whatever work thing needed toiling, I stumbled upon this gem of a release from Rot’em Records. Who could resist that album art? Who could resist that theme? And who could resist the more than reasonable, almost hard to believe price tag on a cassette featuring that cover art and that theme? Not I.

Rot’em Records ascribes a smorgasbord of tags to Hellwalker that, despite the almost laughable diversity, I don’t particularly disagree with: alternative, black metal, blackened death metal, death metal, old school death metal, black metal, death metal, punk rock, and synthwave. These are all ingredients in the Hellwalker cauldron, some more present than others, old school death metal being the more obvious.

And it’s no small task to make this work. Novices need not apply, I imagine—on paper, these “projects,” as they are often called, very rarely sound as inviting as their authors intend. Yet there’s a certain amount of care in the assembly here that almost immediately distinguishes it from those kinds of endeavors, separate and apart from the music itself. Even the all-caps song titles are charming.

The buzzsaw and synth of “UNCHAINED PREDATOR” was the first thing I heard from Hellwalker. There’s a simplistic addictiveness to it that I still find refreshing; Astro-Creep: 2000-era White Zombie playing old school death metal, with a Realmbuilder-style solo thrown in for good measure.

More artful than novel, there’s an impressive deliberateness in the quirk here. Good poor taste. The John Waters aesthetic in musical form. I recognize what this is and I can’t turn away. I’ve heard all of it from a million elsewheres, but never here, in a single form, repurposed, comfortable fit to boot. That this feels like an album and not a collection of oddball jackassery put to tape is a testament to Hellwalker’s lone architect. For fear of selling it short, I hesitate to call the album fun but it’s an inescapable truth.

As a general rule, the more ignorant the riff, the more fun I had with Hellwalker. “SPREADING DOOM.” “UNCHAINED PREDATOR.” The opening bass in “THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND.” Though there are no lowlights, these are the obvious highlights—the decadent dark chocolate in your favorite bakery’s buttery chocolate croissant. Start there and work your way around. You may be pleasantly surprised.