If you ask me, Greece has one of the most underappreciated metal scenes as a whole in the entire world. For years, the country has been one of the places I always find myself going to in order to find quality that I won’t find much elsewhere, and it has yet to let me down. Soulskinner is a name that is far from new to my ears, but any new material is beyond welcome. Even so, it’s with their fifth effort that I find myself taken aback more so than ever before.

This has been a band that I’ve always regarded as a well-kept underground secret given the fact that they are criminally unknown in the greater scheme with their sound being just as raw and unforgiving as the underground has ever produced, but it feels different within the dripping confines of “Seven Bowls of Wrath”. Soulskinner has just as vicious as they’ve ever been so don’t think I’m trying to insult them by insinuating that they’re losing their edge, but it’s in all ten tracks of this effort that we see them become much more refined than ever before as if they took a whetting stone to their very sound. Whatever they did in post-production (I’m just going to assume it’s a post thing, feel free to tell me I’m wrong and dumb), it worked spectacularly to the point where I feel confident in saying that Soulskinner has never been more potent than what we’re given here with all of their talent and past experience doing nothing but justice yet again this time around. In every way, this is still a release made for the underground excavators of metal. “Seven Bowls of Wrath” has that undeniable blood-driven viciousness behind it all along with truly raw power and masterful understanding of every death metal to such a degree that it’d be a task to turn away from this work, and I cannot help but feel that Soulskinner has produced what they have always been destined to: a gem of the underground.

A record the likes of which should not be passed aside for any avid listener worth their own oxygen, “Seven Bowls of Wrath” is just as devastating as it is a testament to how menacing the power behind this act is. Everything about what Soulskinner has done here is the payoff of decades of building up their repertoire, and I couldn’t think of a better result than this excellence.

“Seven Bowls of Wrath” releases on November 11th via Xtreem Music!

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