Teratoma Longing Voracity Review
Teratoma
Longing Voracity
Me Saco Un Ojo
2026
Coming straight out of one of metal’s most celebrated countries, that being Germany, we have the second offering of stench-filled, cryptic death metal madness from Teratoma. Before we dig into this fresh grave, let's dive a little deeper into their blood-soaked backstory.
Unfortunately, I don't know much at present other than that they are a quintet. The press release doesn't really go into their band history and instead chooses to let the music do the talking. Putting on my sleuthing cap and scouring the web, their name (per Google) means “a rare, usually congenital, germ cell tumor composed of various tissue types, such as hair, muscle, teeth, or bone, resulting from abnormal development.” So right out of the gate, their name is a bit of a human deformity, and you can't get much more genre-specific than that. After further information gathering, they began in 2021 in Ilmenau and released the full-length Purulent Manifestations that same year.
The production here is what you would expect: megaton-heavy, downtuned guitars (Sandro and Rolo), murky, distorted bass (Giacomo), raw and organic drums with a fondness for double bass every now and again (Caue), and some seriously low-slung, slightly buried growls (Dani). I wouldn't call this lo-fi, but I would call it raw, visceral, and befitting of the golden age of death metal (the early to mid ’90s) style of recordings. That suits me just fine, as it all sounds mean, organic, and not the least bit modern. I wish more extreme metal would approach things this way, as much of it is starting to sound entirely too perfect and immaculately produced and performed.
We get an intro and nine songs with Longing Veracity. The whole album runs 45 minutes, and it held my attention for its duration with little to no variance in the actual tempo of the compositions themselves. I know that sounds like a detriment, but it's not. I like it when a band locks in and gives the overall album a certain mood or feel. The mood presented here is that of impending doom and is very dark and morose. Sometimes you can be extremely heavy and powerful without breaking the sound barrier with speed or blast beats. Teratoma excels at that.
Musically, this is coming from the gut-level, mid-paced grinding school of thought (“Chaotic Bewilderment”), with some harmonized, doomier guitar lines, short bursts of speed (“Ravaged and Absorbed”), and even the odd acoustic-led interlude with flute flourishes (“Interim”) and simple yet impactful riffs (“Spewing Atrocities”). Another aspect that I find interesting is Dani’s vocal approach. While it's mostly very deep and guttural, sometimes he chooses to end his vocal patterns with these gross, netherworldly high grunts, and they make the atmosphere even more unsettling.
Teratoma aren't really doing anything new. In fact, like many death metal bands right now, they are combing the old-school desert for inspiration, but they are doing it very effectively and in a well-informed manner without sounding like the 7,000th iteration of Entombed or something. In all actuality, if I had to absolutely pin down exact references, this is a perfect marriage of the non-HM-2 Swedish bands with the twisted and depressive Finnish sound, all rolled into a tidy, rotting corpse. So, dig on this unholy union of sounds from below and get destroyed by it as it fully devours you with its meaty hooks like a feral, lumbering beast. Here's hoping they don't take another five years between releases. Longing Veracity is a worthy addition to the old-school death metal–worshipping hordes out there.
-TB
RIYL- Rotted, Hyperdontia, Tomb Mold, Molder, Hooded Menace