I didn't catch this Swedish death metal band's debut a few years back, or if I did it left no lasting impression, but the cover art for this follow-up drew me in, and first song “Mind Desecrator” kept me hooked with its simplistic but barbaric DM. 

Somewhere between Aeon and Undeath, but leaning more toward the former, Wretched Fate's take on death metal will please almost anyone into the genre, be it old-school Floridian diehards, new-school Black Dahlia worshippers, or Swedish black-leaning grumps. Really, it's all death metal, but it can be hard to stretch across the genre like that, Wretched Fate avoiding the caves and the places where lo-fi production dwells, but hitting all the meat-and-potatoes sounds with doses of cool, interesting melody (“Momentary Suicide”) and technical see-we-can riffing (“Cry From Beyond”) spicing things up. 

Album highlight “Umbilical Suffocation” shows a great sense of late-era Behemoth drama and DM groove, and really shows the band coming into their own, but the ghosts of Swedish DM are never far behind, as “Harlots For Suffering” proves before the band leans into a great groove on “Morbid Testament” and close things off with “Spineless Horror”'s six minutes of epic, atmospheric death metal grinding and crushing. 

Impressive stuff for sure, Wretched Fate sort of hitting a mean medium median but doing so with grace and ease, and keeping us captivated every riff of the way.