Goo-ed Morning, Here’re Some Gastropods!

Metal’s seen no end of ridiculously–themed artists in recent years, but slug-themed two-piece Slugdge are towards the end of the bizarreness spectrum. These crazy (and devoted) Brits take things one step further than Jarzombek’s Slither homage, crafting an entire album of six-minute slug songs laden with outrageously punny titles and lyricisms that echo their fascination with the hermaphroditic paragons of slime and subversion.

Slugdge are no gimmick band, though; their music is cohesively bound together with viscous globs of mucoid riffage and a spectral continuum of harsh and clean vocals. The tracks are informed by the same extradimensionally warped harmonies practiced by Gorguts and Ulcerate as well as the depraved sense of melody I often associate with Deathspell Omega, but Slugdge carve up those artists’ breakneck psychosis into a murky, mid-tempo trawl.

Their debut album Born of Slime has the kind of unpolished, organic sound that lets the band’s black metal influence fully manifest, with the phasey blur of double kick slithering over unorthodox interval voicings. I’m having trouble coming up with other artists to compare them to, but the furious downtuned heaviness of the tracks vaguely reminds me of funeral doom stalwarts Ahab and new MS faves Stomach Earth, with a bit more of a pulse.

Stream “All Shell Perish” and the rest of Born of Slime below. You can download the band’s debut album at Bandcamp for the extravagant price of ZERO dollars, but you should really throw them at least a few bucks for it.