Band: HETEROPSY (Jap)
Album: "Embalming"

Tracklist
01 - The Dawning (Intro)
02 - Pandemonium Alter
03 - The Sodomizer
04 - Asphyxia
05 - Memento Mori
06 - Seventh Damnation
07 - Methadone
08 - Old Friends

::REVIEW::

Japan’s Heteropsy arrives with Embalming, a debut that feels less like a first statement and more like the excavation of something long buried and still rotting. Formed in 2020 and sharing members with Frostvore, the Tokyo quartet weaponizes the familiar HM-2 chainsaw tone but rejects its overfamiliar clichés. They call their sound “mourning death metal,” and that self-coined term fits with their blend of death metal steeped in grief and derangement, where emotion curdles into rot.
Across its 44 minutes, Embalming swings between suffocating doom passages and sudden bursts of melodic clarity. After the album intro, “Pandemonium Altar” sets the tone immediately with classic Stockholm grit welded to eerie melodic phrasing that recalls Afflicted or God Macabre, but delivered with a distinctly Japanese sense of precision and theatricality. “The Sodomizer” grinds forward with brutish weight, its riffs staggering under the distortion’s pressure, while “Memento Mori” finds the band pushing toward cinematic melancholy without sacrificing bite. By the time closer “Old Friends” lurches through its ten-minute death march, the listener is left drained, unsure whether they’ve endured ritual mourning or possession.
What elevates Embalming is its command of contrast. The band moves from towering heaviness to near fragile moments of atmosphere without losing coherence. The production remains deliberately raw, each riff feels sculpted, and every drum hit is placed with intention. Rather than mimic Sweden’s golden era, Heteropsy dissect it, study its anatomy, then reassemble the corpse into something leaner and more disturbing.
It’s an album that bridges reverence and reinvention, merging the frozen melancholy of early ’90s death metal with the strange pathos that only Japan’s underground seems capable of invoking. Embalming is not here for nostalgia's sake, it’s here solely for resurrection through decay.

Review written by FuegoCasa in collaboration with Headbangers Australia in November 2025.