“The skulls I see mean nothing to me.”
New Jersey has a rather unique plethora of attractive characteristics. Princeton, the Jersey Shore, pork roll, tomato pie, and slamming brutal death metal. While categorically divergent for the most part, they all exhibit a qualitative pinnacle.
South Jersey, in particular, has a long history of slam-filled dominance across the extreme metal scene. This commanding reign began in 2006 with Waking the Cadaver’s iconic demo and has resolutely sustained ever since. Asystole, Subterfuge, The Adept, Embludgeonment, and God only knows what else. The aforementioned string of acts is intentionally enumerated; however, as intersectional alumni from each band recently converged to form Compulsed. It’s no secret that 2025 has been a tremendous year for brutal death metal, and Compulsed may have very well eradicated much of the competition with another decisive New Jersey triumph. For anyone who’s been looking to break out of the increasingly generic shell that has regrettably surrounded a good bit of brutal death metal, Compulsed eats the apparatus for lunch and has the rest of us as sloppy seconds with their debut album, Amalgamated Anguish.
It’s not often that acts in this space are fortunate enough to have longstanding experience in their lineup. At every level, Compulsed is graced with genre veterans. While Mike Mayo and Matt Crismond will obviously stand out due to their past association with Waking the Cadaver, bassist Kyle Linderman and vocalist Ken England share equal measures of South Jersey death metal expertise. Looking to hear a band take all the best aspects of their previous work and meld them together? That’s precisely what you are given. Stylistically parallel to Waking the Cadaver’s slamming hooks and pedal-breaking fills, in sync with Subterfuge’s disintegrating bass drops, and the trademark scraping lows of England that coated Embludgeonment, Compulsed embodies the most distinctive and strongest facets of every previous act they are wrought from.
We hear a recurring adage of vocals being a secondary instrument atop everything else, rightfully so. In the case of Compulsed, that notion is taken to the furthest extreme. If you’ve ever wondered what Chief Toad Gamabunta would sound like if he took a five-ton puff of PCP-laced crack while gurgling his own saliva, England’s vocals are likely the closest representation that will ever be put to record. At times, this becomes almost laughably absurd, albeit simultaneously bone-shattering. Sure, Amalgamated Anguish is instrumentally lethal in its own right, but the New Jersey power plant genetically modified frog reverbs of England offer an especially fleshed-out layer to this sonic conquest.
Instrumentals, from the more traditional side, are rich in diversity on this album. External influence of their prior projects aside, Compulsed throw in shades of Suffocation and Dying Fetus left and right throughout Amalgamated Anguish. Stride for stride with Crismond’s crisp kit work, Mayo and Linderman’s drop-tuned hooks alternate more frequently than bank accounts get emptied in Atlantic City. Pure technical execution is where Compulsed truly manage to separate themselves. Many records are outright unpalatable for the sake of simply being as abrasive as possible. It can’t be denied there’s a certain appeal to it, but at some point, the crippled one-trick pony needs to be euthanized. Amalgamated Anguish is pressurized air tank reaming on steroids, punishing yet stimulating all the same.
Engineering is what makes Amalgamated Anguish the unyielding freight train it is. You may be thinking: Is listening to noise that came from a Walmart-brand toaster oven not what makes heavy music callously alluring on occasion? The general inclination is to answer, “yes”. Specifically, the arena that Compulsed resides in showcases inflamed production to exacerbate the odiousness of the sound in a fair number of instances. Though for Amalgamated Anguish, a big reason it sounds as crowd-killing-inducing as it does is due in large part to AJ Viana’s mostly masterful work on the mixing board. Even while equilibrium from the standpoint of instrumental balance, explicitly the bass, isn’t achieved, Compulsed displays compensatory technicality to an extent where this matters very little.
Somehow, 2025 keeps getting more preposterously stacked by the week. Compulsed are the umpteenth addition to that pile. They may have only just released their debut, but the South Jersey four-piece is already a lightyear ahead of many others. Experience, raw aptitude, and sheer volition are attributes rarely observed in a band that is just starting out. Amalgamated Anguish has given Compulsed the initial acceleration that few can only dream of. Should they manage to not only keep the momentum but build on it, they’ll be mowing down everything in their path well into the coming years and beyond.
9/10
Amalgamated Anguish has released as of August 15 via Iron Fortress Records and can be ordered here.