Cannibal Corpse: A New Dawn of Butchery

Almost nothing in life is as much of a dead-set, bet-the-mortgage certainty that a new CANNIBAL CORPSE album will absolutely slay. The Buffalo-then-Tampa death metal legends have built a remarkable career on consistency, showing growth with every single one of their fifteen albums while still sounding unequivocally like themselves at every turn. To say all their records sound exactly the same shows a total lack of understanding of the genre they helped define, but at the same time, you could never accuse them of wild experimentation either. So, when CANNIBAL CORPSE announced their 15th full-length album, Violence Unimagined, the vast majority of the metal world thought they knew pretty much what they were in for – but no one expected it to be this god damn good.

No one is more qualified to discuss the classic CANNIBAL CORPSE sound – and the gradual growth of the band over the last three decades – than Alex Webster. Founding member, bassist, and one of the principle songwriters alongside drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz, Webster has been a main cog in the CANNIBAL CORPSE machine, his work on and off the stage a large part of the band’s success. But even over 30 years in, he is still keen to learn and progress his considerable talents – even if that means stripping things back.

“Red Before Black had some of the more straightforward songs that we’ve done in recent years. There’s still some pretty challenging stuff on there, but we found that the album as a whole was catchier, it had an easier to follow vibe. We’ve continued in that direction with Violence Unimagined – that’s the natural next step for us.” Webster begins, commenting on the current stage of CANNIBAL CORPSE‘s sonic evolution, and his journey as a songwriter.

“Over the years we’ve experimented with making the band more technical, with learning more about making things more obscure, but now we’ve really focussed in on how to make a song dynamic but also easy to follow without being dumbed down. We want to write really catchy songs that are still interesting… It became pretty clear to us we aren’t going to be the most technical death metal band, or the fastest death metal band – we are not the sprinters of our genre. Nobody is going to say we’re the fastest or the most technical, but maybe we do write some of the catchiest death metal. Technical ability is a means to an end. It’s also about writing a wide variety of types of death metal – Violence Unimagined is all CANNIBAL CORPSE, but every song has a unique identity.”

It’s impossible to discuss Violence Unimagined without talking about Erik Rutan. The death metal legend joined the band initially as a touring guitarist in 2019, before stepping in as a full member of CANNIBAL CORPSE for this record. Though he has been involved in the past as a producer and his friendship with the band has been well documented, his introduction into the fold as a contributing member has given the band an incredible new lease of life.

“It was a very natural thing – when he joined as our live guitarist in 2019 it was an immediate fit. Erik is such a fun guy to be around, and he can really bring the mood up in the room. And, of course, he’s an elite level guitarist, his playing is top notch. We’ve been friends for decades, so him joining was about as easy as it could be – ditto for him joining the band [as a full member] – he immediately started writing and his material fit perfectly, it’s so killer. He just knows what CANNIBAL CORPSE is supposed to be.” Webster reflects on Rutan‘s inclusion to the band. “By virtue of all the hats he’s wearing, Erik Rutan is the MVP of Violence Unimagined, without a doubt! He wrote three full songs – music and lyrics – plus he produced and engineered the album, then he’s playing guitar on most of the songs, and he wrote all these killer leads. He’s such a hard worker, such an amazing person to have on the team.”

One of the principal aspects of CANNIBAL CORPSE‘s reputation – an infamy from outside of the metal scene – is their lyrics. Brutality and gore have been a staple of the band’s written works since their inception. And given the nature of their success, and the extremity of the lyrical content, quizzing the band on their lyrics has become low-hanging fruit over the years. It’s well established now that the band take great influence from the horror genre, though they’d be the last to claim they were the first to walk this path.

“Horror and death metal, they’re totally connected, man. It goes all the way back to traditional heavy metal with IRON MAIDEN and BLACK SABBATH – maybe they even took their name from the Boris Karloff movie, I’m not sure – but a lot of the early heavy metal bands had a horror slant to them.” Webster begins. “For a subgenre like death metal, death metal is horror music. You have horror movies, horror novels, horror comics, horror video games – death metal is horror music. For us, we like each song to be its own little story. There’s only so much you can tell in a handful of paragraphs over a few minutes, but we try and give enough information for the listener to use their imagination to fill in the blanks with whatever they like.”

Webster‘s lyrical inspiration doesn’t always come from the depths of Clive Barker, Wes Craven, and George A. Romero, though. Talking on one of the songs he penned in its entirely for Violence Unimagined, Webster digs into the unlikely sources that got his creative juices flowing. “Surround, Kill, Devour – that one has two key influences. The first one, I happened to see a photo series of a pack of wolves taking down an elk – it was a brutal scene of nature. I’ve always thought it’s interesting how wolves use teamwork to hunt.” He begins. “Right around the time I was writing lyrics, the uncertainty of the world made me think a little bit of movies like The Road – an apocalypse scenario where we run out of food. When people run out of food, there’s going to be some people who resort to cannibalism. Given what our band sings about, I thought this would be an appropriate idea for lyrics. It’s a little bit different – most of the songs we write that feature cannibalism are more of a Night of the Living Dead kind of thing with a supernatural element, but a food shortage could actually produce something like that.”

It’s easy to sometimes be cynical when bands carrying the “legendary” tag release a new album. Are they just going through the motions? Is this just topping up the pension? Are they passed their best? Not so with Violence Unimagined. There’s very little here that’s going to convince someone on the fence about the death metal pioneers – if their last fourteen albums have done nothing for you, this probably won’t either. But then again, who in their right mind is still on the fence about CANNIBAL CORPSE? Taking their tried, tested and patented formula to a new level with the addition of Rutan to the fold, CANNIBAL CORPSE sound more energetic and passionate than they have any right to – Violence Unimagined is the herald of a new dawn of butchery from death metal’s favourite forefathers.

Violence Unimagined is out now via Metal Blade Records. 

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