Formed last year by two members of lunglust, Severed Boy has wasted little time in giving listeners some murky and foreboding death/doom. The first taste of their take on the genre came courtesy of last year’s Coughing Up the Night single, which has been followed up by the recently released Tragic Encounters EP. It’s a quick listen at around twenty minutes in length, but Severed Boy showcases plenty of potential with the type of slow, lurching riffs you’d expect from death/doom alongside some haunting melodic leads and horror movie soundscapes.
The title track gives you a pretty good idea of what you’re in for, as it opens with a creepy melody that reverberates over the recording for about thirty seconds or so before that familiar heavy tonality kicks in. Severed Boy fall pretty evenly between the death metal and doom sides of death/doom on these first two tracks, with some chunkier grooves and blasts alongside slower, methodical sections where the murky atmosphere is really able to expand outwards. The melodies on “Pooling” even bring a little funeral doom to mind, with the haunting guitar lead reminding me a bit of Mournful Congregation alongside a slew of classic US death metal. “Agony and Despair” is where things get a little weirder and much more unsettling, as the band settles into a drone track here where harsh and desolate sounds are stretched out while a sample from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein plays over top of them. It’s a short burst that brings a number of horror movies and the likes of Silent Hill to mind and given Anatomia’s similar exploration of more freeform and horrifying soundscapes back in May it feels appropriate that another death/doom band would go for something similar and pull it off. Admittedly the last two tracks lean a bit more into the standard chunky death metal tone and that didn’t stand out quite as much when compared to the earlier ones, but Tragic Encounters remains enjoyable overall.
Severed Boy’s lyrical content explores the darkest reaches of the human mind and the types of horrific acts that have been done throughout time, which suits the grimy instrumental sound perfectly. Vocalist Nicholas Wolf delivers these lyrics with a guttural growl that heads into some higher screams at just the right moments, but each word is enunciated so that it’s easier to make out the gist of each track than is common for death metal. There are some subtle variations in pitch on each song, and as a whole the performance is quite strong and works to the band’s advantage. Wolf also spent time contributing vocals for Phantom Glue a few years alongside Matt Oates, and it’s interesting to find the two now in dueling death/doom bands with Oates now in GOG.
Seeing that they formed not that long ago during the quarantine madness of 2020, Severed Boy has already accomplished quite a bit. They’ve latched onto that grimy and filthy aesthetic that works so well for death/doom and are able to deliver heavy hitting attacks and slower, creepy moments. If they can expand on the haunting melodic leads and incorporate even more of the horror movie type dark ambient and drone into their death metal foundation, I think they’ll be able to stand out even further within a fairly crowded genre. Tragic Encounters is available from Caligari Records.
-Review by Chris Dahlberg
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