Review by Carl on November 26, 2025.

It has taken them some five years, but it's finally here: Caustic Wound's second full-length album. Spoiler alert: it was well worth the wait!

As on their first offering to the world back in 2020, the band delivers another acidic blob of grinding death metal mayhem. If you'd drop Rotten Sound, Incantation and Terrorizer in a blender, with a pretty generous scoop of Repulsion and a puff of Nails added, the end result would most probably sound very close to what Caustic Wound has to offer us mere mortals. Throughout a selection of short, aggressive and certainly heavy songs, the band is firing on all cylinders, belting out a vicious concoction of blasting grindcore velocity, squirming death metal riffing, shredding leads that would not sound out of place on a Morbid Angel album, as well as calculated doses of crawling heaviness. The music is doused in a heavy-ass layer of downtuned distortion, making the mixture sound simply crushing, yet without everything deteriorating into an impenetrable mush. A lot of attention has gone into the short and pointy tracks, which are brought with a punk-ish energy and heaps of conviction, delivering hooks aplenty. At their slowest, the band gives off a vibe reminiscent of Incantation at their most morose, with the more crushing side of Godflesh also having left some bloody marks in Caustic Wound's sound, something that works very well with both the heavy guitar sound and speedy sections on offer. This is some seriously ripping stuff, absolutely executed to the nines, something which helps to alleviate the fact that the rough and low roaring vocals tend to get somewhat monotonous towards the end. Admittedly, this is a minor critique, one that's easily swept under the rug by a total and relentless battering of an album too, but hey, a nerd like me needs something to bitch about, right?

That a band like this needs a fitting production shouldn't even be mentioned, and on this point, this album delivers as well, because this sound mix makes the music offered land like a brick in the face. It's clear as crystal without losing that raw edge needed for this type of stuff, while ensuring that the heavy guitars simply roar throughout the runtime of this album. The clearly audible presence of the bulldozing bass in the mix is more than welcome, adding even more crushing density to an already punishing production job. There are oodles of death metal bands out there that would sell an organ for a sound like this, I'm sure.

With this second offering, Caustic Wound successfully continues down the path they started on their debut (and most probably earlier than that), breaking bones, snapping necks and splitting heads all along the way, proving that savage grinding death is still a force to be reckoned with. At the time of writing, 2025 is not even halfway, but I'm getting this itchy feeling that I may have already found my album of the year.

Rating: 9 out of 10