Cadaver

Over 30 years into their nefarious saga, Cadaver remain one of the most unique and potent forces in contemporary heaviness. Formed in Norway in 1988 and led by founding vocalist/guitarist Anders Odden, they pioneered a strange and terrifying strain of death metal that proudly ignored the rulebook. Showcased on seminal debut Hallucinating Anxiety and its sophisticated follow-up, In Pains (1992), their commitment to a subversive ethos set them apart from the vast majority of like-minded bands.

In 2023, Cadaver are back once again to raise a scabby middle digit to the very notion of metal conformity. After a turbulent few years, during which he fought and won a battle with cancer, Odden and his drumming comrade Dirk Verbeuren have concocted a deranged and venomous follow-up to 2020’s widely acclaimed Edder & Bile. Both true to the band’s primitive roots and an audacious, ground-breaking, psychedelic horror-show, The Age Of The Offended is an angry, fucked up album for angry, fucked up times, defiantly created against the odds.

Aside from the inestimable skills of drummer Dirk Verbeuren, Odden is joined on The Age Of The Offended by some extremely notable figures. Firstly, Norwegian metal legend Ronni Le Tekrø, guitarist with old school heroes TNT, can be heard shredding like a madman all over the album. Originally brought in to play a solo on Cadaver’s twisted reworking of TNT classic Deadly Metal (also, incidentally, the name of Odden’s first band), Ronni subsequently enjoyed the experience so much that he offered to perform on the whole record. Meanwhile, double-bass maestro Eilert Solstad, who performed on ….In Pains in 1992, returns to the Cadaver fold on the murderous Scum Of The Earth, adding scabrous textures and subterranean tones to Odden’s cudgelling storm of riffs.

Following up the grotesque rebirth of Edder & Bile was never going to be easy, but The Age Of The Offended confirms that Cadaver are on a roll and growing in strength and confidence. A wild and wicked barrage of hallucinatory brutality, it strikes a blow for originality, curiosity and defiance, in a world transfixed by the utterly mundane. Right now, as ever, nothing and no one else sounds remotely like them.