As You Drown‘s first album, Reflection was one of my top 25 albums of 2009, so I was pretty psyched to hear these Swede’s follow up. I’ve sort of mentally linked As You Drown to Australia’s The Red Shore,who released their 2nd album ( I know its their third but here in the US, albums […]

With so many deathcore, melodic death metal and old school death metal bands releasing new records recently, it makes listening to a new, normal, straight-up extreme death metal record refreshing—which usually isn’t the case. Amidst the soulful and lush tunes of acts like Arch Enemy and Insomnium, the brutal breakdowns of Suicide Silence and All Shall Perish, and the traditional onslaughts of Vader and Decapitated, hearing some crushing and no-frills-yet-modern-sounding death metal from Swe—melo-death—den is truly surprising.Introducing: As You Drown. This death metal quintet may still be wet behind the ears, but they sure play fast and hard like Behemoth—minus the blasphemous lyrical theme, elaborate costumes and occasional illegal stage antics of course. As with many other bands, As You Drown don’t just look up to Behemoth. They worship the traditional death metal veterans as well (as you will see later on in this interview).It’s no wonder then that their music is a face-flaying aural concoction of mini-gun drumming, killer riffs and pissed off vokills. In my first feature for this site, I spoke with frontman Henrik Blomqvist to find out more about their latest giant-rodent-themed record, their tour experiences with legendary bands, and Ikea meatballs among other things.

One could easily look at the moniker, cookie cutter logo, generic computerized cover art, and Metal Blade’s recent release history, and make the assumption that As You Drown is merely another drop in the generic deathcore bucket. Wrong. As You Drown (previously named Ethereal) hail from Sweden and play death metal. Really good fucking death […]