Review by Felix on January 1, 2023.

Due to a “Trench Warfare”, “The Beast” is going to “Crush Us with Fire”. You better “Submit to Death” in this “Burning Inferno of Death”. Anyway, you will see your “Ashes from a Past Life” very soon.

Those who are not put off in view of the song titles that have fed the first paragraph – I must tell you that things don’t get better when it comes to the material of “Crush Us with Fire”. Suicidal Winds perform a pretty raw and furious form of black / thrash / death metal. A technical component does not play a big role, only with regard to the high velocity that surely demands very solid manual skills. That’s okay so far, restlessness and ferocity are always welcome. But these elements need to be combined with clever song-writing and this is exactly the point where the problems of these Swedes begin.

Naturally, the whole systems fails when the songs do not have the necessary degree of quality. Here the riffs lack catchiness, the single parts do not blend seamlessly with each other and breaks rather tear the songs apart instead of giving them an exciting structure. Everything has to stand behind the creation of the highest possible level of brutality and generally speaking, this is not a promising approach. “Crush Us with Fire” clears your head violently and readjust your coordinates, but I doubt that this alone makes things better. Fact is that no song keeps sticking in the ear and this applies for the new studio songs, the cover version and the live track. In view of this result, the adequate production cannot save the EP from falling through the net.

In short, “Crush Us with Fire” is much weaker than the full-lengths of the Swedish wrecking bars. Suicidal Winds do not do everything wrong, but a coherent impression does not show up. The usual tools like the roughshod vocals are present and none of them alone causes headaches, but the compositions just do not work the way they should. “Trying to crush us with pure noise” would have been a more fitting title for this release.

Rating: 4.6 out of 10