Review by Fran on February 7, 2026.

Origin’s homonymous album came as the perfect continuation of “A Coming Into Existence”. In fact, it features re-recordings from the tracks contained on their first EP, plus 5 unreleased songs. The songwriting style is practically the same, but the production is slightly better. In this record, you can hear a thicker layer of the guitars and the bass, in terms of mixing; it’s less percussive than its predecessor but more balanced.

The first line-up change saw George Fluke being replaced by John Longstreth, one of my favorite extreme metal drummers, by the way. While the past drummer wasn’t bad at all, you can hear the difference. It adds a lot to the mechanical feeling the band had in this era, how he consistently keeps the velocity through each stroke on the double bass drum sections, the gravity blast beats on the snare, the creativity on the tom fills, and the cymbal work; the guy is a machine. His style plays a fundamental role in what Origin would become; it’s in this full-length where we can hear the first glimpses of the trance-inducing rhythmic patterns that made “Antithesis” one of the best brutal death metal efforts ever. The bass guitar was recorded by Doug Williams instead of Clint Appelhanz; it’s a little bit more present on the mix than it was on “A Coming Into Existence” and serves as a mattress for the guitar tracks, as the textbook suggests.

Jeremy Turner and Paul Ryan repeat as guitarists on this one, and you can hear bits of improvement in that department as well. Composition-wise, the songs follow the same structure; they are short and go for the throat, but you can hear more harmonic tension on the 5 previously unreleased songs than on the other four, added to the rhythmic tension experiments the band already made on their debut. There are some riffs on 'Disease Called Man' that resemble their later works, featuring more complex guitar licks; it’s definitely the most interesting track on this CD. Vocals are more dynamic, too. Mark Manning did his gutturals again, but Paul Ryan doubled them with some high-pitched choruses. If you are into brutal death metal, you will surely like this.

Rating: 8 out of 10