Undead This Side Of The Grave Review
Undead
This Side of the Grave
Edged Circle Productions
2025
Undead (no, not the CA punk band and not Bobby Steele’s band of the same name) break into 2025 with a brand-new four-song rager called This Side of the Grave. The Swedish quartet has been churning out material since 2015, dealing in cleanly executed, skillfully crafted, crushing old-school death metal. Per their press release, they’re “hailed for their ability to mix an old school approach to death metal with the fresh stench of decomposing bodies without being sentimental or sounding outdated.”
This EP (their fifth release overall) checks every box of what we know as the “Swedish death metal sound.” For the uninitiated, that means thick, bass-heavy slabs of Boss HM-2 buzzsaw guitars, moody and creepy minor-key melodic parts, booming d-beat and blast-driven drums, pedal-heavy bass, and razor-throated growls that rest somewhere between gutturals and blackened shrieks. Swedish extreme metal legend Dan Swanö (Edge of Sanity, Odyssey, Bloodbath, etc.) handled the mix and master, capturing the band’s thorny, visceral attack with a production that’s faithful to the style’s pioneers while carrying just enough modern loudness and rawness to appeal to both fanbases. It’s fiercely old school in its aural ferocity, but with today’s bells and whistles.
The songs don’t stray far from prime Entombed, Dismember, Carnage, and even Hooded Menace as influences, but Undead add their own spice to avoid being a carbon copy. For example, “I Am the Curse” storms in with harmonized guitars before slamming into a double-bass-heavy midsection and dropping a cool spoken-word passage near its conclusion. Elsewhere, “Blood Enemy” rips through speedy verses before shifting into a near-hardcore breakdown, then kicking into a speed metal section that resembles Udo-era Accept—only filthier, nastier, and meaner. Lead single “Samsara” carves its left-hand path with swirling aggression and more double-bass-driven breakdowns, while the title track creeps in with a reverb-soaked intro before pummeling into triplet-picked thunder reminiscent of The Haunted’s debut.
At just fifteen minutes and twelve seconds, Undead arrive, carve you up, leave you begging for life, and then vanish—working strictly on the old Stone Cold Steve Austin principle: Arrive. Raise Hell. Leave. This isn’t the first rodeo for this kind of death metal, but Undead pull it off with such venom and youthful vigor that it’s impossible to ignore.
So, rest in festering slime, linger among the tombstones, and blast this mean, zombified sonofabitch…
~TB