Missing Pieces: The Best Of What We Missed In 2025 So Far, Vol. 3

It’s the middle of the year, so we’re taking a few days to round up some of our favorites we failed to cover in the past six months. As you can read above, this is Volume 3 of our annual Missing Pieces feature, and if you (ironically) missed the first two parts, you can find them here and here.

PUTRIDITY ‒ MORBID ATARAXIA

released June 27; Willowtip

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to take a pneumatic hammer covered in broken glass and cranked to full power directly to the back of your noggin? A hideous tool of destruction that creates thousands of newborn-style soft spots in the crunchy, white, and now useless bones you once called your skull. Your brain, skeletal bits, teeth, eyes, and hair become a sloppy goo that, for some reason, drips into a blender stacked six high with blades made of great white shark teeth voraciously slurping down the inexplicably still sentient slop. An endlessly spinning, gnashing of jagged enameloid and dentine with no top flings bits of a former desk worker into a nearby woodchipper, taking the finite bits of your humanity and launching them into a blackhole to be spaghettified into nothingness.

Anyway, the new Putridity album is pretty neat.

In fact, it’s so neat that they can even be forgiven for the dumbass decision to put several minutes of a repeating obnoxious sound in the middle of the closing song and then firing off what essentially equates to a “hidden track” from the early 2000s. That does not a quality 12-minuter make, fellas! Luckily, everything else around it is a perfectly cacophonous assault on the senses, that the cerebral juice is worth the squeeze of your bulbous melon.

The sample closing out “Mors Mater Nostra” summarizes everything within Morbid Ataraxia quite well: “Kill everyone now. Condone first-degree murder. Advocate cannibalism. EAT SHIT!” [SPENCER HOTZ]

MEAT SPREADER / PUTREFACTION SETS IN – HOUSE OF MAGGOT / THE EXTENT OF THE PUTRESCENT CRAWLING SWARM’S DIGESTION (SPLIT)

PUTREFACTION SETS-IN / FESTERDECAY ‒ SPLIT

released February 7; Behind The Mountain

Two splits, three bands, all blood, all guts, all fun (to borrow a turn of phrase from another band, not represented here)…

What we do have here is a double shot of Swedish / Brazilian goregrind “supergroup” Putrefaction Sets In (members of Nasum, Expurgo, Lymphatic Phlegm, others), plus one side each of Polish goregrind supergroup Meat Spreader (members of Neuropathia, Dead Infection, Squash Bowels, others) and Japan’s FesterDecay, who are a super group, albeit with that phrase in two words. (Also, RIP FesterDecay bassist Gokkun, who passed away in January.)

So yeah, this is goregrind, with all that it ent(r)ails. For the purposes of this writing, Meat Spreader opens the pit up, ripping through three tracks of hyperactive, crust-leaning grinding, all incoherent grunts and slicer-dicer riffing. The middle and longest of the three, “Abdominal Aorta Aneurism” is the punkiest and catchiest, a grand representation of the raw and filthy grind that this band parlayed into a well-deserved spot on my year-end list last year (if I do say so myself) with their second full-length, Mental Disease Transmitted By Radioactive Fear. Old-school ferocious filth, this half will leave you looking like that poor bastard on the cover, and I suppose that’s a good thing…

The Putrefaction Sets In half opens with a pathological soundbite about the “bloat stage,” and a similarly carving and grimy tone, albeit a noticeably different one than that of Meat Spreader. The bass tone is notably filthy, as evidenced in “Putrescent De-Compounds”, and the dueling vocal approach – while not exactly new – adds a fun other layer. All in, five-point-five minutes of fast and furious gore, and this side will leave you looking like the poor bastard whose face graces its cover… and again, that’s a good thing…

released June 6; RFL Records

And if you agree, then you get a second split, with more Putrefaction Sets In, five more tracks in about five more minutes, with standout moments in the chunky swagger-to-blastbeat crustiness of “Resuscitation-Related Injuries” and the almost stoner-y grooves that slide between the grinds in “Decay-Micals… All Ptomaine’s Fault.” Sure, by now, if you’ve been keeping up with this band through the one full-length (which also made my year-end list, but two years ago now) and then the split above, then… well, you’re expecting blood, and you’ve got it.

FesterDecay opens their half with buzzing flies and a kaiju-sized doom riff, “Detritus” in nearly two minutes of gargling snarls and stomping, before the tribal-ish jauntiness of “In Chains Of Sickness” segues into more traditional grinding. With the band’s aesthetic a deliberate attempt at recapturing the rawness of Reek Of Putrefaction, it’s no surprise that the production here is the least clear, bass-heavy and muddy. The guitars are a wash of fuzz punctuated with piercing squalling leads, the bass a low indistinct whoosh, and the vocals run from garbled grunts to the occasional screech, but again… well, yeah, you know it’s good.

…And really, I could keep going, but once again, it’s goregrind, played by three relatively short-lived but very promising bands, two of whom are made up of scene veterans who absolutely have the CVs to grind you to bits. You know what you’re getting here. But the getting is good, so get to it. [ANDREW EDMUNDS]

URAKKA ‒ DRAIN THE SKY

released April 4; Independent

Rochester’s Urakka is a zany band, and their debut Drain the Sky is pretty wild. Not so much wild in the sense that you’ll be floored by any single element or need to immediately share it with your closest friends, but more wild in the sense that it perplexes in a perplexing manner that doesn’t necessarily seem particularly perplexing when unpacked. Feeling perplexed? Well, it’s kind of like having a conversation with yourself that goes: “That was cool. I don’t really know what I just heard, but it was cool. I think I’ll listen again, because it was cool.”

And man, it is cool. Urakka, more than all their genre splicing and oddball twists, possesses swagger. That swagger is what carries this mix of space rock, prog metal, trad metal, stoner rock, and bits of noise and drone and grunge (which doesn’t tell the full story); it’s like a strange but ultra charismatic combination of Hawkwind, Kyuss, King Crimson, and Black Sabbath (which also doesn’t tell the full story). A lot of that swagger comes from a singer that sounds like a perfect combination of Ian Astbury and John Garcia, but that thick bass tone certainly doesn’t hurt. Neither does their mix of bluesy stoner riffs and knotty, dissonant prog diversions (with a lot of spaced out synths at extremely opportune times) and occasional accelerations into hardcore/thrash aggression (with the vocals doing some wacky screams).

There’s definitely a lot going on within the 45 minutes of Drain the Sky, but never does it feel like Urakka is saying “Hey, look how much we’ve got going on!” Rather, it manages to be technical and tight but raw and unfussy, like they spent a lot of time refining compositions then just jammed them out in one take in the studio. The result is a record that feels both extremely throwback and yet futuristic, and just adventurous enough to be the perfect soundtrack for an adventure (Rush fans can own t-top convertibles too, you know). Mostly, it’s damn cool, and you’ll want to hit play again immediately after it’s over. [ZACH DUVALL]

ULTIMATE DISASTER ‒ FOR PROGRESS…

released April 1; Grave Mistake Records

Listening to a record like For Progress… immediately makes me miss our friend Craig Hayes and his long-running ovation to all things crusty, noisy, punky, D-beated and stenchy: In Crust We Trust. Craig is fine, by the way—perhaps enjoying all things loud AND EVEN LOUDER at a more casual pace these days—but I’m guessing if he were here right now he’d lock arms with me and co-trumpet the greatness of Ultimate Disaster and this, their second release following an already turbo-charged demo back in 2024.

In case the stark visuals don’t give it away, this is D-beat that beats the D into your face with nary a concern for barreling into any sort of elaborate plans for reinventing the wheel. In fact, the most innovative part of this entire endeavor relates to how Ultimate Disaster is considerate enough to put the ‘DIS’ in the second part of their name. The rest? Pure D-beat fired from a flame thrower in 12 short minutes that will leave your head looking like you regularly lay your head to rest on a fucking campfire. It’s a leaner / cleaner affair compared to last year’s demo, but somehow that cleanliness manages only to amplify Ultimate Disaster’s overall ferocity to the Nth degree in lieu of anything that feels weirdly lighter.

Bottom line: For Progress… is a short fuse leading to a furious explosion inside your head, so it’s essentially the ideal soundtrack to your 2025. [CAPTAIN]

Posted by Last Rites

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