Review by Carl on July 19, 2026.

Phew, this is one big meatball to get through, because with over an hour of grinding death metal on offer, you sure get quite some bang for your buck, to say the least. The reason for this is that Fleshless has added their demo to the album as well, so yeah, this pads out the runtime a good deal. And it's a good thing they did, because for me, these tracks are the best part of this album.

This band was in on the grinding death metal game early on, and you can hear that in their sound, because they have quite a few old school-isms running through this album. The riffs have this occasional Possessed/Death/Pestilence vibe hanging over them, with the title track even winking at 80's Kreator in the riffing. The song structures are influenced by acts such as Cannibal Corpse, Luciferion, and Sinister, combining slower midtempo styled sections with grinding fury, while the band strews leads and guitar licks into the mix throughout. At their most intense, the band shows a clear influence of grindcore bands like Agathocles, Rot, and early Napalm Death, with the most striking aspect being the low, growling vocals of frontman Vlad, neatly keeping the band's sound together. Through the use of thrash influences and even a slight smattering of punk ("A Piece of Flesh"), the band avoids becoming one-dimensional in their music, but at the same time also gets somewhat unfocused in their doings as well. They manage to keep the ship steady for the most part, but a nagging feeling at the back of my head also says that some trimming of the fat could've been beneficial here. For instance, was it really that necessary to have so many acoustic breaks throughout? I'm all for variation, but if I start thinking "here they go again..." every time these pop up, it's too much for my taste.

There are other things that I found pretty irritating as well, like the sterile drum machine on the first part of the album. It's your typical '90s plastic-sounding, totally boxy percussion deal, and one that sucks out quite some of the power here, despite it being programmed very adequately. It simply cuts off the balls of the music, and that is pretty unfortunate for a band in this style. The included demo avoids this problem by having a real drummer, and while he got the late 90's trigger treatment, the man luckily doesn't sound as stiff as the machine does. As a whole, the production also isn't all that, with the guitars sounding kinda flat in the first part of the album, but that feeling picks up on the demo tracks, fortunately.

Despite these technical flaws, "Grindgod" does a pretty good job of doing what it does best, and that is dealing out varied grinding death metal. When looking at the whole album, it's a pretty good exercise in extreme music, although the many breaks and tempo changes make it somewhat difficult to take it all in at one go. Not counting the lesser parts, I enjoy this album well enough for what it is, with the demo tracks being my favourite part of this lengthy offering.

I'd say that this is an interesting release for all into death/grind with an old school flair to it. It's nothing indispensable, but still good fun when divided into more manageable bite-size portions.

Rating: 7 out of 10