It goes without saying that the sprawling underground of all that is metal is truly bountiful with talent should you simply look in the right places and have the proper amount of patience to allow that talent to craft their next creation. More often than not, talent comes from groups rather than a single person whose lone efforts cannot be considered anything other than torturous until their works are truly ready to be released upon the world, and there truly is something special to the latter. The singular person behind the still relatively new name of Herxheim is no stranger to our ears at this point, but it’s still with any and all new material that he’s put forth that it manages to be enchanting of the most diabolical variety, and that’s no different with this band’s sophomore full-length album.

I will not even begin down the road of comparing Herxheim’s newest to what the man did before in Howls of Ebb for even though there are similarities, it wouldn’t be fair whatsoever. What’s been brought forth in order to craft the band’s second album is nothing short of the next logical step that Herxheim could’ve possibly made as it takes much of the same exact DNA that was brought forth in order to bring life to 2020’s “Incised Arrival”, but Herxheim still managed to make the work something that stands tall on its own. Ditching the more nuanced atmospheres of the effort that came before it, “Woe Unto Thee” has a vision that is all but concise and devastating in its clarity of vision only matching its intensity. This is death metal of the most foreboding sort. It has the patience, the power, and the unyielding menace of the exact sort that we should’ve expected from Herxheim whenever it came back around, but it’s still somehow that I find myself floored by all that was brought forth in order to bring the pulsating mass and carnivorous darkness that is “Woe Unto Thee” into the light so that all of its disgusting details truly scar all who look upon it, and yet it is difficult to rip yourself away from. The very essence of this album is something that pulls the listener in ever-deeper into Herxheim’s twisted sense of death metal that really pushes the style to be something so much more chaotic and diabolical yet calculated and precise than what many of us would come to expect out of the style, but that’s just the very beginnings of what it means to really peel apart what Herxheim has wrought in order to really make “Woe Unto Thee” an underground experience that shouldn’t be passed up.

There are always a select number of entities out there that manage to really set themselves apart in the underground whether it be through one band, multiple, or just always being a presence that we’re never able to truly escape from even if we were to try to. The man behind Herxheim is definitely someone that I keep finding myself coming across, and I don’t think I could be any happier about it no matter what band we’re talking about. Herxheim always already proved itself as an underground creation meant for the truly vetted amongst us who want something darker and deeper out of death metal in ways that extremely few are able to tap into, and it’s all that comes into play for “Woe Unto Thee” that we’re able to witness those depraved depths taken just another step further.

LISTEN to “Woe Unto Thee” on Bandcamp here.

Herxheim does not have any sort of social media that I could find, so please follow the band on Bandcamp here to stay up-to-date on the band’s activity in the future.