Martyrdöd – Paranoia (2012)

Delivering a wall of crusty guitars and a very decadent (but effective) mixture of Punk and D-beat with Death and Black Metal influences, today we have Sweden’s Martyrdöd and their full-length release “Paranoia”. While we usually don’t like this type of music, Martyrdöd does a great job in making it engaging, brutal, and well sounding, enough for us to be fully immersed in the 11 tracks presented in this release.

Opening with some sick riffs, “Nog Är Nog” fully delivers the unexpected: a five minute song (not 2 minutes like other bands) with excellent melodic elements as well as the traditional crusty sound and punkish edge of these kinds of releases. The band’s focus on the catchiness of the riffing is excellent perfectly contrasting the more aggressive sections. With a more Black Metal influences tracks like “Överkom Er Rädsla” and “Hör Världens Rop” feel like a punkish version of Immortal with some of Satyricon’s edge from the 90’s. These two songs are the perfect example of why Martyrdöd is beyond your typical one-dimensional crust band and can delivers in many different fronts while maintaining their identity.

As the intensity keeps building up and the excellent tracks are piling up, we stumble upon our favorite song: “Det Sker Samtidigt”. The punk/d-beat edge in this track is excellent and with the heavy distorted guitars it takes a more brutal role than traditional tracks in this vein. The vocals are pretty raspy, but very fitting for such a massive wall of sound presented by the band. While the drumming keeps things interesting, is the guitar work that takes the attention since it mixes different styles seamlessly crating a very different and unique sound.

Cruising through catchy tracks like “Paranoia” and the very entertaining closer BM-like closer “Varje Val Har Sitt Pris”, Martyrdöd comes full cycle with a super catchy and direct release from beginning to end. The band manages to merge genres and navigate through them like nobody’s business, we particularly enjoyed that they made some of the creepiest sounding genres be enjoyable and have a sense of melody they were lacking. If you are ready to be blown away whether you like Black, Death Metal or Crust, you will surely enjoy “Paranoia”.

Release: May 22nd, 2012

Country: Sweden