One of the leaders of the newer crop of death metal acts is Denmark’s Baest. Third album Necro Sapiens is proof in the pulverizing pudding taking influences from the old-school and pushing it forward with distinct melodicism and doesn’t lose clarity in the uncompromising brutality. The song structure is brilliant as this is a pure album experience through and through. Necro Sapiens establishes Baest as one of the best death metal has to offer; don’t sleep on these fellas.

BraveWords spoke to energetic frontman Simon Olsen in a feature story; an excerpt below:

BraveWords: There have been comparisons drawn to Baest and old-school death metal greats like Entombed and Morbid Angel. How have you guys strived to honour those heroes of death metal while also forging your own path?

Simon: “First of all I think we had ourselves as a group that we looked at, because it is easy to do. We were kind like in our 20s, 30s, young people. And we're going to like, OK, what do we think is cool? And then we recognized that some of the old school fans that listen to a lot of like ‘90s death metal had a kind of retrospective happiness about the band and the sound. ‘You sound kind of like a mixture of Bloodbath and the old bands that we liked, like Illdisposed in the ‘90s. Yeah, it's so fucking cool!’ But we also seem to have, after a while and gaining some sort of success, caught on to some amount of young fans. Yeah, definitely important to maintain an audience that is young because young people are the prime fucking listeners. Those that might take the music throughout their lives and create meaning in the society around them and in themselves as well. So I believe that having that young audience and appealing to the younger audience as broad as possible can also make our music go as broad as possible.

“We don't want to be a parody. It's a destructible word, I would rather say we are inspired by (death metal legends). And I also think the new album is a more mature album because we worked a lot with our own sound and tried to put out that range and similarities, we try to put them more aside. The HM-2 guitar tone we've put a bit more back in the soundscape to create more room for a more airy and melodic theme. And I think that's a sign of us trying to experiment with our own sound. I definitely think the new album is the most Baest sounding album. I definitely think we've spent more time focusing on the new sound, on new kind of atmospheres as well. A track like ‘Czar’, which is kind of more dragging and in terms of form it's much more fluid and liquidy. We're trying to experiment a lot more with the atmosphere in the music other than hooks and stuff like that. Trying to to seek areas that obviously are not in the perspective of the more traditional sound of trying to make metal. But we also have a straight up old school death metal vibe too. We're an old school death metal band and we love that sound. So I think we're trying to experiment with the middle way of that, trying to find some things. But I think after this album we'll not stop just trying to experiment. I think we're still trying to evolve into something. Wherever it goes, man.”

BraveWords: Necro Sapiens is arguably your most complete and cohesive record yet. It truly feels like you’ve found that sweet-spot, that mixture of old school meets new. For all hands, did it feel during this process that you’ve truly found your rhythm?

Simon: “Yeah! We pretty much went into the rehearsal room and rehearsed the songs and tried to make forms and stuff like that. We were confident that this is something quite new and something more progressive than the other things that we did on album one and two too. But I also think it's a natural evolution. In terms of how we recorded the album, we wanted to take the live dynamics and energy into the album from the rehearsal room as well as we played it there. A good sign is when we have a laugh. When you straight up play a riff which is so fucking awesome that it makes you laugh in the middle of it all. That's when you know that we're going to take this into the studio man, and just play it as it is. We've recorded most of the album live, actually, all the instruments playing together. When we were done with one particular track we went out and usually got shit drunk and listened to the music, with all its aspects as well. It's much more kickass than going in, putting a layer on. Now you have to listen to drums, now you have to listen to guitars. Why not listen to it all together? And I also think that has a lot to do with us getting confident and digging the new kind of old school sound on the new album.”

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