Malthusian The Summoning Bell Review
Malthusian
The Summoning Bell
Relapse Records
2025
Brothers, sisters, vermin of the earth, gather close. For the bell has tolled, and its tone is not salvation but damnation. Malthusian have returned to unleash upon us a scripture of ruin, an album forged not of riffs alone but of curses, plagues, and the slow collapse of heaven itself. Hopeless Death Metal for the insane…
When “Red, Waiting” begins, it is as if the altar cloth has been set aflame. The guitars gnash like locust wings, the drums fall like stones from the sky, and the lone voice, guttural and inhuman, becomes the preacher of pestilence. This is prophecy written in blood.
“The Summoning Bell” itself, the title track, the unholy mass, does not ring with hope. It is iron cast in sulfur, a call to gather not in worship but in defiance. Each chord is a spire collapsing, each shriek a saint unmade. Here, the sacred dies screaming.
And then comes the true gospel: “Amongst the Swarms of Vermin,” a fifteen-minute cathedral of decay and rot. It does not comfort, it devours. It shifts, halts, erupts, a sermon too vast for human tongues, a scripture written by vermin gnawing on the bones of angels. Listen long enough, and you will swear the floor beneath you is giving way.
By the end, “In Chaos, exult” is not a finale, it is a coronation. A crown of maggots placed upon the skull of creation, a hymn for the damned, a benediction of nothingness.
The Summoning Bell is no mere record; it is an unholy sacrament. A sermon at the altar of disorder, where the chalice overflows not with wine but with filth, bile, and the laughter of the void. The faithful of light will flee. The heretics will kneel. And we, the chosen of the ruinous path, shall raise our horns as the bell tolls again, summoning not God, but the end of days.