Feliz Jueves, motherfuckers. It’s time to end your week early with a galactic beatdown of blunt-force sludge courtesy of California’s Mordeo because once you hear this, you ain’t getting shit else done at work, around the home, nothing. Formed in September 2023, the five-piece have been stewing away watching our world grow ever more hateful and irredeemably evil beyond the imaginations of the best fiction writers and doom-dreamers. The result of all this pressure is not a nugget of coal, but a sharp, dirtied diamond the size of the business end of a morningstar.
Mordeo‘s self-titled debut album comes out tomorrow for all the normies, but we’ve grabbed the opportunity to show it off early by the hair and slammed it onto your desk. It’s an album so massive and damaging that it had to be released with the combined efforts of three (3) labels who know how to handle weapons-grade material like this: Hypaethral Records, Forever Never Ends Records, and Shove Records. Without further ado, take a listen to Mordeo by Mordeo:
Forced to come up with only one word for this project, I’d pick ‘sundering’. This is high-class sludge metal for a low-class world, grafted with bits of crusty hardcore and D-beat which means I can’t help but compare it to the late, great Black Breath. If you know who that band is/was, then I know you just hit play because that’s not a comparison I make lightly. Mordeo aren’t imitators though – for as apparent as their influences may be at times, they still operate in such a way that it’s hard to pin them down. Their first LP contains an arsenal of violence, from the malaise and acidity of the first track/single “Bring Back The Fear” all the way to “Profits for Prophets (Swamp Justice)” palm striking your nose bone into your brain with a final barrage of intensity.
“The Narcissist”, “No More Chances”, and “Coward” all undulate down deeper into depths that could turn the strongest men into mummified husks. The whole album has immense locomotion to it, stirring the darkest macabre feelings within you and then later channeling that feeling to your extremities so you can nuke the most parasitic and detestable parts of our world until they return to dust. Fuzzy feedback from the amps of the band sounds like sizzling you’d hear after a police precinct goes up in flames.
It’s hard to oversell just how well Mordeo captures the ferocity of the moment. This is the kind of shit you hear in your head when you see a cop on the street and get the intrusive thought to reach for their gun. This is power forged through decades and centuries of oppression, and all the pain that comes with it. There’s absolutely a time and a place to build a better world for us and our neighbors, but before that happens, we must destroy the current one that’s long past metastasized with cultural and societal cancers – Mordeo is the soundtrack for the latter.
If you liked what you heard, you can preorder this LP in a variety of ways. For vinyl, Hypaethral Records has a Blood Red variant on their Bandcamp, Forever Never Ends Records is dishing out a classic Brown colorway at their website, and Shove Records has the Mexican Coke Bottle Clear over at their Bandcamp. You can also follow Mordeo and claim their album digitally over at their own Bandcamp and check their Instagram as well. ¡Salud!
Band photo by Julianna Rose
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