As the rest of The Goat Review staff shook their heads and calmly returned to work, Pong Goat and Goose-dimensional Being of Extreme Slam Damage *GASP* ventured down to the deepest sewer they could find — on a quest to cover all slam released in January 2026. Where the hammers slam wildly and the vocals are as guttural as a bowel movement, only the goats and geese would go — and as they dove deeper into the sewers, it was only pain they found. Slamuary — a vain pursuit and a waste of time, a testament to the absurdity of animalistic behavior. Be it goregrind, brutal slamming death metal, goregrind, brutal slamming goregrind, gorenoise or any other number of totally distinguishable microgenres — as long as it slams, it counts.
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO GET IN THE PIT
Pong-Addled Goat Enthusiast
What's with this $$$lamuary? I want to delve into the sewers. I want my shoes to fill with sewage water, each step taking me one step further to needing it amputated to avoid an infectious trenchfoot scenario. Yet, so far, it feels more like getting my socks soaked from the ominous fluid of a ripped garbage bag when taking out the trash. Pus Lab is fine, enjoyable at times even, but there is very little that is actively bad or remarkable about it. The band is a member of the budding Taiwanese scene and competent enough both on a performance and a production level. The snare is ringy, loud and the vocals are guttural. Yet, there are innumerable albums like it, released every month. Where the bad albums at?
Rating: 5/10
Raw production is a virus and while it had been contained to the frosty mountains of shitty black metal so far, it has now spread towards the far reaches of Arizona, where the poor immune system of sunbathing slammers makes them an easy prey. Burned and Boiled is a short affair and intense in the sense that its chaotic, raw, and poorly played. Like many other releases I encountered this $$$lamuary, this one seems to be recorded live and while the band certainly has tighter chops than something like Womb Tomb, the production totally ruins what could otherwise be a serviceable brutal death release. What I can say though: this production seems more lazy than like a choice. And that's good — because raw black metal bands do it on purpose.
Rating: 4/10
The unfittingly named Disfiguring the Goddess have been on my shitlist ever since I reviewed their 2023 album The Brutal Machine during a particularly slow month. Disfiguring the Goddess, at the time, combined the worst of EDM and ambient tropes with the worst of what slamming deathcore had to offer, layering trope upon trope to produce the most hate-able parfait of that month. Yet, Soundscapes of Death doesn't even give me the pleasure of intensely hating something. For the most part, Disfiguring the Goddess pull back on the elements of their sound that are the least stylistically compatible, going for a darker, more grimy style of EDM to meld with their bog standard deathcore. Now that the material is average — and feels far less forced in how the two styles are being mixed — I ironically get less enjoyment out of this, because it's better. I want to feel something.
Rating: 5/10
The first thing this year that isn't really slam but has slipped through the cracks. Mouldwarp play a groove and midtempo-oriented style of death metal that isn't really brutal death metal, but that isn't really classic death metal either. They even have some overall unusual stoner inflections to the sound that don't really seem intentional. It's a style that really grew in popularity after Sanguisugabogg became one of the newest acts to hype up in death metal (something I myself am guilty of), but it rarely has been done well, even by the Boggsters themselves. Mouldwarp is not the act to break the mould on this, feeling somehow lethargic, rather than groovy, especially since they can't seem to afford the swampy analogue production that often benefits acts like these.
Rating: 4/10
Whelmed. Neither over, nor under. Just whelmed. I want to apologize to my reader for how $$$lamuary is going, even if it really isn't my own fault but this $$$lamuary's theme seems to be that everything is mid. Extraterrestrial Homicide is, at the end of the day, a serviceable slam EP. Especially considering that it seems to be mostly a teaser or demo, I really can't be all that harsh with it. If I say this band live they might make me inclined to swing some hammers, even. But as $$$lamuary is often confined to the digital realm, there isn't much that I can do to raise my enjoyment beyond the level of being whelmed.
Rating: 5/10
Fuck you Nick. The only thing that is fatal about you is your insistence to label this as slam. The shitty scenecore I just listened to barely qualifies as death metal, much less as slam. This is not heavy. It's trying to be cool. Cool in the sense that young scene kids with unnecessary amounts of mascara think it's cool. Or women in menopause, as this EP apparently is based on a true crime show. Seriously, who is this actually for? Scene kids will find the slam vocals unappealing, while those who slam hammers on the regular will find the material presented to be entirely too flaccid.
Rating: 5/10
Goose-dimensional Being of Extreme Slam Damage
Are those fucking acoustic guitars in my slam? I guess, at least, they're steel strings as opposed to nylons. As you might guess, Hacksaw presents less as a slam band and more as a death metal band that finds power in the slam. Given that their strengths lie in the riff, that intro of undeathly strumming and such really needs to go. The remainder of this EP sits along the early Dying Fetus/Misery Index strain of rhythmically urgent and groove-dunking death metal. Yet, despite that attack, none of these songs feel like they make a proper journey over the hump of memorability. You could do a lot worse, especially when the drummer is this tight, but that's a given in $$$$$lamuary.
Rating: 4/10
In the realm of bedroom slam, no one expects real drums — only real, true, brain-damaged snare sounds no matter the source. Instead, Decaying Delights relies on a mechanical guitar pulse punctuated by a snare that's all e-kit reverb. You know, a bit of the Godflesh model except playing supremely dumb music. At its core, Decaying Lights, in its swirling, recursive riffage, is a goregrind record. Not a very good, fast, or approachable one, mind you. But at least it's an experience with a passion for throwing drum tones into the meat grinder and see what's left in the bone pulp.
Rating: 4/10
It's hard to pull off groovy goregrind well. It doesn't help that neither groove nor goregrind have the highest success rates. Anhedonia Schizphrenica Nevrosa goes one step further and adds the chugging shuffle of deathcore to their heaviness roster in a vain attempt to find a different and vital hold on guitar mud. This triad of terror ensures that whether ripping down a tinny tremolo run, lumbering along a bassy breakdown stutter, or squealing down a chunky punk grindshot, ASN sucks, and not in an interesting way. Rarely commiting to any of its riff ideas for longer than two minutes, also tossing gothy doom and melodeath into the mix at some point, it's hard to get what ASN really wants to be when it grows up. Whatever its creator decides, though, I guarantee it will be remedial.
Rating: 2/10
