Review by Greg on December 13, 2024.

Good job by Xtreem Music for this long-overdue reissue of a tape that was thought to have been lost for decades! We gotta applaud and commend these efforts to shine a light on the golden age of thrash, where you could find treasures whenever you looked, and many are still waiting to be unearthed. Now we ca—hold on a sec...

[phone rings off-screen; unintelligible conversation]

Uhhh, so, apparently, Ireful is a brand-new band from the sunny and boiling hot lands of Sicily, southern Italy, and Agents Of Doom is their debut album, released in the summer of 2024. Shocked now? I surely was.

For a sometimes abused, but truer here more than ever, definition, Agents Of Doom is an album that truly doesn't invent anything new. Anything. Look at the artwork and logo, feel the totally old-school production, and you'll be naive to expect, say, blackened/atmospheric detours, blast-beats, progressive structure, you name it. Ireful play thrash, pure and simple. Now, normally I'm not very fond of these kinds of albums, but there's something about this one that truly pleased me (if you're wondering, no, the band didn't pay me, even though it might have helped). The riffs might be a good explanation: often echoing Vio-lence, for a change, especially the "Oppressing The Masses" era, when not blended with more traditional lightning-fast picking, the common trait is that they're, well, awesome. I always maintained that you don't need to reinvent the wheel if you do what you do with passion and confidence, and this is spot-on evidence. The voice of A. Medusa follows suit, prioritizing charisma over any regard for metric, with a timbre most definitely bringing to mind "Zetro" Souza, but also occasionally veering towards Katon de Pena of Hirax fame, more than Sean Killian. Lyrics are sometimes too complicated for the general English level, with a funny accent to boot – it's gotta be part of the charm hearing the vocalist rhyme 'prayers' with 'fire' with the utmost confidence.

But, you know, thrash is great because sometimes none of these things really matter. You put on 'I, Caligula', or more or less any of the subsequent 7 tracks, and your muscle memory does the rest. It helps that Vio-Ful (brilliant pseudonym of drummer Fulvio, which should give you another hint about the guys' favourite band) channels his inner Perry Strickland more often than not, but a handful of slower moments are also worth mentioning, like the chorus of said opener falling over you like a ton of bricks, or the slow-burning first halves of the subsequent two tracks. When that doesn't happen, the onslaught never lets up. The final trio of 'Exiles For Metal', 'A.B.Normal', and 'Evil Genius' hardly allows you to catch your breath, among others, but there isn't anything half-assed or something akin. I'm not kidding when I say that even the band's namesake song, barely breaking the 2-minute mark and literally ending where there should have been a bridge, has some incredible riffing in it that so many contemporary bands would (should) be envious of.

Another commonly abused phrase in these cases goes like 'if this had been released in the 80s, people would be singing its praise'. I don't need to point out how inherently stupid it is, since if an album came out in 2024, there's no way somebody would have been able to play it as is 40 years earlier, but that's another story. The point is, while far from a potential lost classic of the genre, Agents Of Doom is an album that could be credible as being conceived in those oh-so-distant times, for once. I don't know if that's the highest praise Ireful were going for, but I guess it's praise, nonetheless. Put it on, headbang till whiplash occurs, rinse and repeat.

Rating: 8.4 out of 10