Vampire are unashamedly old school in outlook; 2012’s debut demo was a cassette tape and then seven-inch vinyl-only affair, long sold out thanks to internet word-of-mouth. Following their blistering set at last year’s Live Evil, anticipation was high for their debut long player, and rightly so.
Vampire hail from the Swedish city of Gothenburg, but don’t expect polished and polite melodeath. Instead, they go for the throat, so to speak, with the ferocious sounds of early Slayer and Possessed, tempered with the occasional slab of lead-heavy Hellhammer. The likes of At Midnight I’ll Possess Your Corpse and Ungodly Warlock straddle the line between thrash and death metal the way the likes of Infernal Majesty and Sacrifice did in the late 80s.
Oddly, while they don’t sound the same, they share some of the aesthetic feel of the likes of Watain and In Solitude – the same dark foreboding and the sense of total immersion in their craft. Retrogressive they may be, but with the warmth and rawness of 80s metal the production still hits like a sledgehammer. See for yourself what all the fuss is about.
