If you’ve ever wondered what death metal would sound like if someone took the phrase “Ohio slaughterhouse aesthetic” a little too literally, Sanguisugabogg have your answer. Their third album, Hideous Aftermath, isn’t a reinvention. It’s a refinement. A thick, bruised, festering refinement. Produced by Kurt Ballou at God City Studios, it’s the first time the band sound like they’ve moved from the basement to an actual studio without losing the smell of the basement itself. The grime remains; it’s just better lit.
What’s at stake here is whether Sanguisugabogg can move past the “meme band with gross song titles” reputation and prove they’re actually pushing death metal forward. Hideous Aftermath answers that question with a resounding yes, delivered via guttural growl.
The opening track, Rotted Entanglement, sets the tone immediately. It’s everything you’d expect from the ‘Bogg: riffs that sound like bone saws on repeat, vocals that feel like they’re being coughed up from a grave, and drumming so relentless it could probably liquefy a small animal. But underneath that chaos is precision. The kind that suggests these guys have been around long enough to know exactly how to shape their ugliness into something that feels almost musical. Almost.
Devin Swank’s gutturals are still the band’s defining sound. He doesn’t so much sing as manifest low-frequency horror, his phrasing cleaner and sharper than before. You can hear the confidence in his timing, the way he leans into a line, the pause before another growl. It’s a strange thing to say about a man whose lyrics regularly involve corpses, mutilation, and assorted atrocities, but his delivery has matured. He’s learned to make brutality breathe.
By Repulsive Demise, the album takes a left turn into something darker and more mechanical. There’s a cold, industrial pulse beneath the muck, a kind of metallic throb that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Godflesh record. It’s hypnotic, almost groovy, and the restraint is shocking. For a band long accused of “caveman death metal,” this is evolution in real time. The sound feels heavier precisely because it isn’t always sprinting toward the next blast beat. They’ve learned to weaponize space.
When Abhorrent Contraception first dropped as a single, it felt like a signal flare for this new direction. The riffs were still absurdly downtuned, but they had a purpose beyond simply being “the next heavy part.” It’s death metal with a sense of architecture. You can trace where they’re going, but the path still feels dangerous. The closing breakdown is both predictable and satisfying, like the moment the slasher finally shows up and everyone in the audience cheers.
On Felony Abuse of a Corpse, the guitars from Ced Davis and Drew Arnold dig into a half-tempo groove that feels almost celebratory in its grotesquery. It’s disgusting in the best possible way, equal parts humour and horror. Cody Davidson’s drums clatter like chains, keeping the tempo uncomfortably human rather than robotic. That sense of imperfection is the charm. For all the talk about modern metal’s click-track polish, Hideous Aftermath reminds you that looseness can be lethal.
The guest list on Hideous Aftermath reads like a who’s who of modern extremity: Travis Ryan from Cattle Decapitation, Josh Welshman from Defeated Sanity, Todd Jones of Nails, and Dylan Walker of Full of Hell all make appearances. What’s striking is how naturally they fit into the band’s world. Each feature feels earned, not pasted in for clout. There’s a moment on Ritual of Autophagia when Jones enters, and it’s like someone just detonated a stick of dynamite inside the mix. His snarls add another layer of bile to the chaos, pushing Swank to respond with something even more feral. Ryan’s high screams on Semi-Automatic Facial Reconstruction are particularly vile, so sharp they practically pierce the mix. Yet for all the underground credibility these names bring, it never feels like the ‘Bogg are stepping aside. These are cameos in a movie they’re still directing.
Swank has said Hideous Aftermath is their most personal record yet, which is an intriguing claim from a band whose lyrics have included the phrase “corpse grinder” unironically. But it makes sense. There’s something inward-looking about this album. Not emotional vulnerability, but self-awareness. The gore and absurdity have always been part of the shtick, yet here they feel more intentional, more tongue-in-cheek. It’s as if Sanguisugabogg are simultaneously parodying and perfecting death metal’s obsession with depravity.
You can hear it in Erotic Beheading. The song’s title is as stupid as it is brilliant, but the execution is stunning. The groove is infectious, the tone bottomless, and the way Swank growls through the chorus feels like he’s both mocking and celebrating the genre’s clichés. It’s the rare moment where irony and sincerity coexist perfectly.
The production deserves real credit. Converge’s Kurt Ballou somehow manages to capture the filth without sanitizing it. His work here contrasts sharply with the band’s earlier self-produced efforts, where everything bled together in a murky soup. Ballou gives each instrument its own grotesque clarity. Every riff has weight, but nothing feels sterile. The bass finally has presence, a low-end rumble that holds everything together rather than merely filling space. For a band that once joked about having “no bass, only mud,” this is a serious upgrade.
The drums sound like they’re being recorded inside a furnace, but they still swing. Ballou’s mix doesn’t just serve the brutality; it amplifies it while maintaining the organic feel that makes Sanguisugabogg visceral rather than mechanical. He’s done similar work for Converge and Nails, but here he leans into the sludge rather than tightening it up. The result is clarity within filth, definition without polish.
Then there’s Paid in Flesh, the album’s closer, clocking in at just over eight minutes. It’s a marathon for a band that built its name on two-minute beatdowns, but it works. The first half is all muscle, riffs stacked like bricks; the second half dissolves into a slow, almost cinematic dirge, aided by Dylan Walker’s tortured screams. It’s a rare moment of real atmosphere, the kind that lingers after the last note fades. The song doesn’t resolve. It just stops, like someone pulling the plug on a machine that was never meant to stop running.
For all its viscera, Hideous Aftermath is weirdly fun. Not in a party-album sense, but in that way great death metal always is when the absurdity, the extremity, the sheer audacity of it all becomes exhilarating. You find yourself laughing at the song titles, then headbanging so hard your neck protests. It’s brutal music that doesn’t take itself too seriously but demands that you do.
If Tortured Whole was the sound of a band discovering their identity, and Homicidal Ecstasy was them proving they could play, Hideous Aftermath is Sanguisugabogg asserting control. They know exactly who they are and what they’re good at. The album doesn’t pretend to transcend death metal. It just makes death metal better: tighter, filthier, more deliberate.
This record is one of the most alive-sounding death metal albums in recent memory. The riffs have purpose, the songs have movement, and the band finally sound like a single, snarling organism rather than four dudes in a jam room trying to out-heavy each other. It proves that Sanguisugabogg can evolve without cleaning up, that filth can be an art form, and that somewhere between gore and groove lies something worth celebrating.
Ugly never sounded so precise.
Hideous Aftermath is out now via Century Media Records.
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