Anymore, a work of death metal can feel like a dime a dozen if you’re choosing to look at things through a pessimistic lens. Sure, it all depends on your own taste for what sounds good, what doesn’t, what has potential, what lacks imagination, what is a blatant copy, what turns the sound on its head even a little bit, and everything else in between. Yet, there are always creations that manage to live and breathe to become something that’s their own entirely without once allow such expectations or pessimism get in the way of their artistic vision no matter what form it takes. For some, like Harsh Realm, that results in something that feels immensely familiar but scratches a different itch entirely.

Let there be no confusion here: it’s in many of its forms that death metal has my adoration and undivided attention, but it’s every now and then that my eyes come upon a creation that my ears are quickly thankful for. Combing through the underground can offer a number of different experiences, and I certainly wasn’t expecting such when I came upon the first full-length album from Harsh Realm whose name I’ve only heard whispers of in recent years. With all that they’ve delivered within “Death Carries On”, it becomes exceedingly clear to me that this is a name that is ripe for plague-ridden expansion that is not the underestimated lest the raw power of Harsh Realm was over you and consume your flesh in moments. Yet, it’s amongst the intense riffage that Harsh Realm is immensely prolific at delivering that they manage to tap into something ethereal, even beautiful. With interludes performed with the help of the mysterious Midwife to make for profound introspective on the dichotomy of taking life for reason as well as the indiscriminate madness of gore and death unbound, “Death Carries On” quickly transforms itself from what could have been a slab of death metal that was certainly nothing to defy into a writhing piece of macabre yet beautiful deliverance of undeath that this style can sometimes struggle to tap into.

The rise of Harsh Realm has been undeniable for some time now for those in the known throughout, and it is with the arrival of this creation that Harsh Realm has firmly poised itself now as an act that demands to be given attention for what it can clearly do. Within Asheville does an entity of true darkness stir with the capacity to bring it forth in such a way that makes the body standout from much of the competition. Every inch of “Death Carries On” is nothing to be underestimated.

LISTEN to “Death Carries On” on Bandcamp here.

LIKE Harsh Realm on Facebook here.