So this spring/summer the always reliable FDA records unleashed a couple of lethal debut albums from female-fronted death metal bands. One, was the debut of Itlay’s Dead Chasm, whose solid EP I covered here, and the other from Turkey’s Abolish, who was of interest to me as they feature Lucy Ferra on vocals, who impressed me with her other project Inhuman Depravity.

And while Inhuman Depravity was a much more brutal, technical tale of death metal that leaned hard into Suffocation and Sinister realms, Abolish is a more basic (not in a bad way), old-school death/doom metal style that has more in common with the likes of Runemagick, Obituary, Bolt Thrower, early Death and Massacre (though not quite as Massacre worshipping as Japanese label mates Parasitario) .

If that kind of thing floats your dingy, then Abolish will be for you as it does simple, trundling, plodding sometimes doomy, death metal quite well. The 43-minute, 7-song album, does nothing more, nothing less. It’s got a beefy production, Ferra’s growls are guttural and powerful, and the songs deliver plenty of mid-paced, rumbling death metal that rarely breaks pace.

The 7 pretty long songs mainly reside in that Obituary/Bolt Thrower mix of steady, mid-paced trundle, blast beat and doomy lope heard right away on the opener “Pervert Divine Doctrine” and “Curtain of Night” and closer.  And while there are blast beats, as the band can throttle up when they want ( “Ruins of Empire”, “Forsaken Home of the Dead” )  the majority of the album is that familiar gait. There are also some songs that slow down a little more into more pure,  aforementioned death/doom territory such as “Recm in the Ungodly Lands”, “Beyond the Forgotten Gates of the Otherside”   and my favorite track of the album, the crawling lumber of “Venomous Saints”, though still littered with the occasional blast beat.

In all a solid, no-frills debut of old-school death/doom metal, that you’d expect from FDA Records and gives us another release that exposes a rising vocalist in the genre in Lucy Ferra.

[Visit the band's website]

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