Photo by Raymond Ahner
Decibel Magazine is currently streaming Hell Is Evil, the new full-length from the Bay Area’s favorite grindcore practitioners, DEATHGRAVE. The premiere comes in advance of the record’s release this Friday, August 21st via Tankcrimes.
On Hell Is Evil, DEATHGRAVE expands upon their signature brand of grind. Comments guitarist Greg Wilkinson, “Our goal for this album was to seamlessly bend musical genres and create a unique sound. We allowed you to gaze into our neighborhood on our second album It’s Only Midnight. Hell Is Evil will plunge you with haste into our whole world.”
Writes Decibel, “On Hell Is Evil, DEATHGRAVE open themselves to outside influences, pulling more from thrash, death metal, punk, noise rock and even industrial than ever before. As a result, the 32-minute record is packed to the gills with action…”
Read Decibel’s DEATHGRAVE interview alongside an exclusive stream of Hell Is Evil HERE.
Spawned in 2013, DEATHGRAVE began to weave its own breed of metal based out of San Jose, California. The band initially grabbed elements from many punk and metal bands like Siege, Rudimentary Peni, Napalm Death, Impetigo, Godflesh, and Zeni Geva as well as their own previous bands, and many others, yet their actual musical output never shared a similar sound to the aforementioned artists. This may be best explained due to the similar musical interests while executing a diverse musical past between members.
Comprised of longtime scene veterans, DEATHGRAVE is Greg Wilkinson (Autopsy, Brainoil) alongside bassist Fern Alberts (Amber Asylum), vocalist Andre Cornejo and Clint Zane (Owl) on drums. Over the past thirteen years, they toured multiple regions every year throughout the US, Canada and Mexico, and kept busy recording. To date, they’ve released two demo tapes, four split 7″s, a split 12” and three full length albums which dragged them out from the depths of the underground and into the forefront of the bay area’s grind / metal scene.
DEATHGRAVE’s Hell Is Evil was mixed and mastered at Wilkinson’s Earhammer Studio and includes guest and backup vocals by Chris Reifert on “Hard To Swallow” and art
by Max Rain.
Escape this dreadful reality for the next 32 minutes and dive headfirst into DEATHGRAVE’s most ambitious album to date. The riffs are thick enough to keep you afloat.
The record will be released and CD and digital formats as well as vinyl in the following color variants:
Half Deep Purple / Half Black Ice W/ Purple, Black + Silver Splatter
Deep Purple
Find CD preorders HERE, vinyl preorders HERE and orders at the Tankscrimes Bandcamp HERE.
Hell Is Evil Track Listing:
- Hell Is Evil
- Hard To Swallow
- I Am Here
- Born From Death
- Smaller And Smaller
- It’s Only Midnight
- Yaws 3D
- Your Pain Is Ready
- Won’t See You In Heaven
- 27B/6
DEATHGRAVE Live:
9/11/2026 Great American Music Hall – San Francisco, CA w/ Necrot, Iron Lung
11/13/2026 Cafe Colonial – Sacramento, CA w/ Devil Master
“The song has a fantastically hellish beginning. It brings together brutishly slugging grooves (segmented by bursts of maniacal battery), sinister sequences of descending arpeggios, and shrill notes that miserably shimmer and frantically shiver, like the wailing of tortured souls. In addition to being a hellish manifestation, that opening amalgam not only seizes attention, it gets its big hooks dug deep into a listener’s grey meat. And then foul grunts emerge, the drums go wild, and the riffing begins to convulsively squirm, both dismal and deranged in its sound…” – No Clean Singing on Hell Is Evil title track
“Hell Is Evil proves that DEATHGRAVE doesn’t care how heavy their listeners prefer their music. With both intensity and exciting luminosity, DEATHGRAVE shows that there is always time to slow down and create new musical memories without having to go against one’s own music taste, regardless of how rigid it may seem. Most importantly, DEATHGRAVE proves they are still more than capable of creating music propelled by sheer talent.” – MXDWN
“Hell Is Evil is less a rapidly consumed extreme metal record than a work that demands attention to why a riff is held at a particular tempo and why a song slows down at precisely the point it does. DEATHGRAVE are not inventing new genres; they are stopping grindcore’s constantly forward-driving mechanism and rearranging the same materials in heavier, more structured, and more varied forms. That is ultimately where the album finds its position: DEATHGRAVE expands the center of gravity of their sound by forcing genre boundaries into friction with one another, without sacrificing the dirty, oppositional spirit of underground extreme metal.” – Pitstop Metal
DEATHGRAVE:
Andre Cornejo – vocals
Clint Zane – drums
Fern Alberts – bass
Greg Wilkinson – guitar
http://deathgrave.bandcamp.com
http://www.instagram.com/deathgrave408
http://www.tankcrimes.com
http://www.facebook.com/tankcrimes
http://www.instagram.com/tankcrimes
The post DEATHGRAVE: Decibel Magazine Premieres Hell Is Evil Full-Length From California Deathgrind Outfit; Record To Drop This Friday On Tankcrimes! first appeared on Earsplit Compound.