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Not content with sloshing around in critical froth as drummer with thrash renegades Power Trip, Chris Ulsh has restarted Mammoth Grinder to remind everybody what proper, red-blooded, Neanderthal death metal sounds like. The band’s first album in nearly five years, Cosmic Crypt feels like one single, sustained rush of barbarous sludge: the squalid grotesqueries of Autopsy given a sideways upgrade and double-dipped in Lovecraftian turmoil. Songs like Human Is Obsolete veer from snail’s-pace dismay to a raging, punked-up clatter, as if 30 years of evolution in death metal have been entirely ignored and Death’s Zombie Ritual still remains the ultimate benchmark. Which, in a very real sense, it probably is. Meanwhile, the vicious Locusts Nest could easily be mistaken for a Ribspreader out-take, were it not so utterly filthy in sonic tone and gloriously slack-jawed in execution.

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s.