If you’re anything like me, sometimes you find yourself a little bit down. Stuck in a routine, frustrated by a mountain of small problems, unable to get out from under that weight. I don’t have any one magical trick that I can summon on command to shake me out of those unproductive mental patterns, but without fail, something always comes along to remind me that this world is wide and full of wonder. It might be stepping outside and realizing that the tree shading me is older than the oldest person who ever lived, and that its roots are dancing up through slabs of sidewalk like I might use windshield wipers to clear a drizzling mist. Or, in the case of Kalaveraztekah’s Nikan Axkan, it might be stumbling across a fully formed album by a band completely unknown to me that knocks me flat on my ass and brings me back into the world of the living.
Hailing from the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes, Kalaveraztekah (a stylized name that means something like ‘Aztec Skull’) is a five-piece band that seamlessly incorporates pre-Columbian indigenous instrumentation into their precision death metal assault. Whereas many bands who seek to bring non-traditional instrumentation into metal might relegate those sounds to scene-setting introductions or non-metal interludes, on Nikan Axkan these tones are just as likely to float atop a punishing chug-riff as they are to sit on their own. In addition to the standard death metal arrangement of two guitars, bass, and drums, the album features pipes, flutes, chimes, some subtle synths, something that sounds like a didgeridoo, acoustic guitar, and loads of additional percussion.
Although Kalaveraztekah’s sound was fully primed right out of the gate on their 2020 debut El Desertar de Los Tiempos, this second album improves on it in two huge ways: it is more than 20 minutes shorter, and the production is absolutely massive. The strength of all the excellent ideas found on the debut album was sapped by a slightly thin recording and the sheer overwhelm of a 70+-minute onslaught. Nikan Axkan clocks in at a robust 48 minutes, and even that time flies by due to a very smart sequencing that plays out a thoughtful narrative arc.
Kalaveraztekah’s style of death metal can be both delicately technical and brutishly heavy. They prioritize dense passages of rhythmic unison and memorable vocal cadences, often forgoing over the top technical dexterity in favor of the right riff or the right tempo for the job. The use of early Mesoamerican instruments should appeal to fans of Tzompantli, but the fellow travelers that Kalaveraztekah most often remind me of are other bands who have internalized the rhythms of other musical/cultural traditions, like Melechesh or Krisiun (particularly around the time of The Great Execution). On top of that, though, Kalaveraztekah peppers their melodic, aggressively modern death metal with huge amounts of churning groove, so that maybe the best way to think about Nikan Axkan is that it sounds a little bit like if Nile and Demigod-era Behemoth spent a whoooooooole lot of time listening to Sepultura’s Chaos A.D. and Roots (with a little bit of Gojira sprinkled in for good measure).
If all of this is simply too opaque, here’s the punchline I probably should have led with: Kalaveraztekah’s new album is incredible. It is smart in ways that never feel arrogant, beautiful in ways that never feel cheap, and absolutely fuck-ton heavy in all the ways I want it to be. The spoken-word instrumental “Yowaltekuhtli” leans heavily into a knottier, more modern tech kind of progressive death metal, but then tracks like “Xiuhtekuhtli Weweteotl” and “Wewekoyotl” drop into the kind of chunky, pummeling grooves that will leave your bones rattling long after they finish. The vocals are a powerful, often multi-tracked rhythmic roar, and the two guitars allow for many passages of shit-heavy crunch riffing with a clean, searching lead spun out on top. At times, Kalaveraztekah’s ability to switch from frantic blasts and twitchy tremolo melodies into engrossing, intuitive mid-paced grooves that still keep the intensity fully red-lined reminds me of the compositional acumen of France’s Gorod. This means that even though the get a little fancy here and there, they never lose sight of how to move bodies.
In this Year of Our What the Absolute Fuck 2025, it’s more important than ever to find those things that bring people together, that bridge conflict by reminding us that most perceived difference is really just unrecognized ignorance. Do I expect that Nikan Axkan is going to heal the world? Friend, I do not. In so many excellent ways, though, death metal is like musical Esperanto: I may not speak your language, but we can speak these sounds together. Kalaveraztekah’s very particularity is actually the surest sign of their universality: heavy sounds to move bodies as one.
