There’s no middle ground for Cadaveric Incubator. The Finnish three-piece don’t slow down or turn off or take a second to think about things, they just axe-murder eardrums with their unstoppable mixture of grind, thrash, and old-school death metal. In that way, the band’s music provides a beautiful ‘Eureka!’ moment for the modern metal fan, who hears them after wading through a million subgenres and scenes and thinks, Oh, oh yeah, fuck yeah, this is what I’ve wanted the whole time.
Four years after 2017’s morbid masterpiece Sermons of the Devouring Dead, Cadaveric Incubator have returned with Nightmare Necropolis, eight tracks of beautiful exhumation music. The songs show an evolution for the band, who have switched out some of the horror-themed blips of Sermons… for full-bodied sonic beasts. From start to finish, Nightmare Necropolis is a record for raging, the kind of death metal album that poses a serious threat to anything expensive in your house.
Before our advance stream of the album, we caught up with the band about what went into this particular sonic meat grinder…
How do you feel Cadaveric Incubator sound has changed/evolved since Sermons?
I’d like to say the songwriting has matured on this one, but then again I don’t want to say it since the word has so terrible sound to it! We still rely on our most neanderthal instincts, not wanting to compromise anything on brutality, so ‘maturity’ shouldn’t have anything to do with it. So not much really changed, but there certainly has been more thought on putting the songs together this time around. You be the judge if it’s a good or bad thing.
Do you guys approach songs with specific sounds in mind — This one’s more death metal, this one’s more grind — or do you let the music just come to you?
No, not at all. For writing, I don’t have any other rules than that the song must flow naturally onwards, so it goes where it goes, and you’ll see in the end where the riffs took you. I might have an idea when I start with a new song, but a lot of times it turns into something different in the end. There’s a perfect example on a new EP which we just finished writing, I wanted to make this total savage full-on blastbeat track, but finally it turned into some of the doomiest shit we ever did this far. So go figure!
Is there a track on Nightmare Necropolis that you feel like embodies what Cadaveric Incubator are all about?
That’s a hard one! From these tracks, I would say maybe “Sarcophagidae”, even if it’s not really the most typical song for us at all. But I could name that one simply because it’s got like the whole spectrum of Cadaveric ingredients all put in one song — fast grinding, slow heavy shit, dark moody parts like we occasionally drop here and there. Just total horror glorifying death in whatever form it happens to turn out.
How’d the guest spot by Autopsy’s Eric Cutler come about?
I’d had this idea for this specific song for a while already, thinking, Man, this ending would rule with an Autopsy–style ripping solo in the end, but had already scrapped the idea and written a different ending to it since my guitar skills are pretty limited. I never thought this would ever happen for real. But I met Eric then at a festival we played in Romania, and he seemed to enjoy the show, and few whiskeys later backstage, it was a done deal! So I brought back this original song idea of mine and the result is what you can hear on “Frenzied Hatred.” Same thing happened with the equally killer appearance by Martin from Blood on the track”Blood Lust” — I had the music already and thought this part was like made for his voice, and since we had gotten to know each other due to playing few shows together, I popped the question, and there it is now — perfect!
Who designs your covers? I love the frog on this one!
Except for few EPs, all our artwork are done by Tommi Grönqvist (Desecresy) since day one. I share a long history with him from back when we played together in our old band Slugathor. We’re very pleased with the work he has done for the Cadaveric visuals since beginning, and we plan to keep it that way too as long as he agrees to work with us. The necrofrog on the new one simply came to be when each of us named a thing or two that we wished to be on the new cover, and I guess the one with the most beer in the engine mumbled out, “…a toad!” So a toad it is then!
Stream Cadaveric Incubator’s Nightmare Necropolis below:
Nightmare Necropolis comes out Friday, May 14th, and is available for preorder.
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Words by Chris Krovatin
