Italian metal stalwart Gabriele Gramaglia opens a new, more feral outlet for his death metal explorations with Lugubrious Garment.
Release date: October 16, 2026 | 20 Buck Spin | Bandcamp | Instagram
You gotta love those metal musicians who are just too creative to stay in one band, don’t you? Especially when everything they do is bizarre and unique. Gabriele Gramaglia is definitely one such musician, and so far his list of credits is impressive throughout. Of course his best known project is probably Cosmic Putrefaction, an ever-reliable source of great death metal with a spacey, technical bent where Gramaglia handles pretty much everything. The fact that he has time for other projects as diverse as Vertebra Atlantis and Turris Eburnea, and had time to manage I, Voidhanger while the founder was ill is just even wilder. But I guess he needed another outlet for his creativity, because Lugubrious Garment is here in debut form, ready to provide another dose of great metal via In the Wide Vale of Uncreated Night.
Right off the bat, it’s clear that Lugubrious Garment was meant to be a more feral, and in some regards more old-school beast. It still has all of the progressive hallmarks that Gramaglia’s work is noted for, and the songs tend to be decently lengthy and multifaceted, but the riffs are much more down the line in their reckless death metal abandon. Jagged, angular guitars dominate the songs, tremolo blasts by at lacerating speeds, and the chunkier grooves that pop up wouldn’t be out of place on a late-80’s or early 90’s death metal release. Moreover, there are numerous moments where the music delves into more classic metal sounds, and even toes the line of first-wave black metal once or twice. Fans of those bands that have resurrected that messy, undefined era of unspecific extreme metal (Spirit Possession, Egregore, etc) will likely have no trouble finding plenty to love in Lugubrious Garment‘s ravenous assault.
Take, for instance, the scorching “…And Therein Plant, Unto Their Souls Asunder” (dude has a knack for titles) that opens In the Wide Vale… It punches like an absolute monstrosity for most of its runtime, yet still manages to twist into violins and violas in its coda. “Profound Fountain of Leaden Waters” ended up a runaway favorite of mine, with spidery riffing and avalanche drumming (handled marvelously by session drummer Claudio Invidia) that cedes to a far more melodic, rocking back half that has been hopping into my head at random ever since my first listen.
It bears mentioning that In the Wide Vale… also just sounds excellent. Gramaglia’s handling of the production is perfect for the sort of material Lugubrious Garment presents, feeling airy and roomy enough for the subtleties to emerge while giving the guitars and pounding bass enough force to floor listeners moment to moment. It bolsters the retro feeling I often got across the album, hitting particularly hard on the intro of “Eternal Scars and Imperative Backfire” which feels so much like a lost Bathory stretch that it warmed my heart. Unexpected acoustics and the sounds of a massive fire being set bridge that track to closer “Eden Fades Like Blurred Nightmares” (my own favorite title), which sends out the album out on a hauntingly melodic note, punctuated by sharp riffing at multiple junctures.
For a new project from a seasoned musician, Lugubrious Garment has arrived in marvelous form with In the Wide Vale of Uncreated Night. It’s a savage, nasty tribute to the older, wilder days of death metal, fitting in just enough thrash, heavy, and proto-black metal subtext to feel authentic while fully displaying Gramaglia’s signature progressivism. It may not be the trip to the cosmos that his other projects are, but sometimes what’s stalking the earth alongside us is more threatening anyway. Lugubrious Garment is a savage beast indeed, but it wasted no time staking its place in the food chain.
