ALBUM REVIEW: Sleepers – Genocide Doctrine
When you’re labelled as the Biggest Danish Metal Hope Of The Year by the metal media in your home country, there’s going to be an immense pressure put on everything that you go on to do as a band. That’s precisely the predicament that deathgrind upstarts GENOCIDE DOCTRINE face coming into their debut album Sleepers. Clearly, they’ve taken that accolade as a challenge and tackled it head on with 11 tracks of merciless dissonance, and they’ve done so with a quality that belies their young age as a band.
GENOCIDE DOCTRINE make no bones about their intention – put simply, they play an extreme blend of death metal and grindcore that focuses on expressing primitive anger and intensity. That mission is thrust front and centre with the explosive opening of Nuclear Salvation, which starts – true to name – as if a nuke has been detonated within your own head and rid you of your earthly worries. An outrageous howl from vocalist Mads is paired with breakneck drums and furious guitars and bass in an all-encompassing wave of hatred. The attack lasts just 36 seconds, but the quartet pull no punches and make quite the impression.
Later on, Gouged cuts through as a particularly apocalyptic song, plunging listeners into an abyss of detuned riffs and cataclysmic vocals. Likewise, the title track is a 51-second thrill ride of blunt force brutality that displays just how masterfully GENOCIDE DOCTRINE have melded grindcore and death metal elements. A band that has done their homework and practised hard, they don’t fall into the trap either of sounding like just another deathgrind outfit – there’s an air and quality all their own and it’s one that will appeal to fans of everyone from NAPALM DEATH and PIG DESTROYER to WORMROT and ESCUELA GRIND.
The final entry on the album is Barren, which takes a far doomier route without abandoning their core offering entirely. It’s an accomplished and surprising closing number that reveals yet more of GENOCIDE DOCTRINE’s considerable promise. It’s also a stark reminder of the talent they brought on board behind the scenes, with Jacob Bredahl (who has previously plied his trade with the likes of HATESPHERE and MØL) on mixing and mastering duties. The result is a rich and attractive sound that makes you want to keep on coming back to the aural filth of this album, somehow keeping walls of noise clear enough to hear the intricacies of every band member’s input. Repeated listens reward you with more details that you may not have noticed last time, and offer a vista from which you can focus in different directions each time you visit to spot something new and arresting.
Sleepers is a triumph. It’s as simple as that. What GENOCIDE DOCTRINE have managed here for their debut album has outshone many of their long-standing genre peers and contemporaries, and as an album, this is a lovely little surprise that ought to delight and thrill deathgrind aficionados. Biggest Danish Metal Hope? We certainly agree.
Rating: 8/10
Sleepers is out now via self-release.
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