Gawthrop

***Seoul’s Gawthrop return to reconsign the sub-genre of sludge metal to its most resplendent and burdensome form, unfolding a monumental death and doom-scarred feedback-worshiping monstrosity that will stomp, crush and flatten the listener to death. The enigmatic South Korean amplifier-torture cult had already given the world a glimpse into their cryptic auditory horror through 2019’s self-titled and 2022’s "Jumbo" demo tapes (both remastered and re-released by Sentient Ruin as the "Deterioration" vinyl LP compilation in 2023), but what awaits the listener on the band's first official full-length offering is something so wretched and imposing that it will test the composure and impressionability of even the most unfazed skeptics. Across its grueling thirty six minutes "Kuboa" unravels an utter masterclass of downtuned auditory nihilism that will leave both die hard fans of sludge/doom and extreme metal enthusiasts in general alike in awe and overcome by the ghastly payload of absolute slow-crawling death they've just been crushed by. The legacy of pillars of the genre like Corrupted, Noothgrush, Coffins, and Meth Drinker lives on through through seven epochal and genre-defining slabs of all-devouring subsonic auditory torment that restore sludge/doom to its most iconic and crowning glory.