
It’s a brand new year. The sun’s shining, birds are chirping, and – wait, what’s that smell? A new pile of stinky hardcore-infused death metal, of course. Mutagenic Host, after releasing one demo, lurch back onto the scene nearly five years later with their debut full length The Diseased Machine. Cover art is a major factor in choosing a record to listen to, and Mark Cooper’s grisly abomination of a machine fused with humans in agony nailed the first test. The second test is more important, though: the quality of the music. Is Mutagenic Host a sign of great death metal in 2025, or is this machine condemned to rot in obscurity?
After a synthy intro, The Diseased Machine kicks off at a mid-paced, groove-laden speed, and continues that way for the majority of the album. Riffs here are burly, meat-headed, and have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer being driven into your cranium. Repeatedly. There are some solid workout jams at play here, and tracks like “Genestealer” and “Artificial Harvest of the Obscene” are definite bangers that I’ll come back to while exercising this year. While everything sounds good from a production standpoint, and there’s never a let-up in beating your face in with riffs, The Diseased Machine is lacking in variety. The pacing throughout is entirely one-note, with opportunities to crank up the pace to a real barnburner being squandered. The synth sections with cheesy spoken bits are a touch awkward, too, and “DIRECTIVE:: kill_on_sight” is an odd, completely useless all synth interlude that is two minutes too long, killing the pacing. By the time “Incomprehensible Methods of Slaughter” starts with the same pace as the other proper tracks, it becomes a bit of a slog to get through the rest of the album, with the closer “Rivers of Grief” ending on a whimper rather than the bang The Diseased Machine so desperately needs, electing to have the same slow chugging riff repeat over and over before fading away into more synth.
However, The Diseased Machine is enjoyable for what it is, and if all I want is burly death metal I’d throw this on again. I’ll gladly take something like this over some overlong, terrible raw black metal to start the year, and Mutagenic Host fills that role of the ol’ reliable, and I bet they’re much better live than they are on record. Now if only they could spice it up a notch on their next record and ditch the cheesy synth, they’d have something very good or even great on their hands, because the potential is definitely there.