Slaughter To Prevail - Grizzly
Slaughter To Prevail
Grizzly
Release Date: July 18th, 2025
Label: Sumerian Records
The first time I had heard Slaughter To Prevail, I wasn’t that impressed. I don’t mean to sound like yet another jaded music writer, but it didn’t throw me off balance the way that, say, Lorna Shore’s “To The Hellfire” did when it was released. I could only think, “Really? This is the big, bad, scary metal band that everyone is talking about?” To me, it felt like the hype was surrounding the fact that they were wearing masks and adding an element of the theatrical to it. I didn’t get it all that much.
But now we have Grizzly. Here is a metal album from a band that is pushing the master volume fader of the deathcore genre to its absolute limits. Using words like “guttural” and “heavy” don’t cut it here - at times, Slaughter To Prevail sound like they’ve been pulled from the depths of Hell, with vocalist Alex Terrible leading the decimation of the sinners here on Earth. Grizzly is a ridiculously heavy-hitting album, and it never lets up for even a second. You have two chances to catch your breath: the acoustic intro to “Koschei” and the softer opening of “Rodina”. Other than that, it is a full-fledged heavy metal attack. Even in moments like the break in opening track “Banditos” - which features a mariachi interlude that feels pumped through an AM radio somewhere in the desert - there is an unwavering sense of dread that the next breakdown is going to be one that finally blows out the speakers.
Grizzly is unrelenting in its breakdowns and gravelly, throat-shredding screams, from the opening riff of “Banditos” to the anti-war track “1984”, taking its name from the George Orwell novel of the same name, and written as a condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Vocalist Terrible switches between growling in Russian and English, at some points in the record utilizing a vocal effect that makes his stylings sound more like that of a Decepticon ready to wreak havoc on the planet than an artist taking the stage at festivals around the world.
There are two featured guests on this album, with Falling In Reverse’s Ronnie Radke on “Imdead” and BABYMETAL on “Song 3”. These are both fine guest spots, and while they do give these songs an added edge at times, Slaughter To Prevail doesn’t need them to succeed. These songs stand on their own as commanding, high-octane metal numbers that are mosh pit ready. The guitars in every song are unyieldingly intense, razor sharp enough to cut through glass. Terrible’s vocal stylings may be one of the main draws, but the musicians holding down the group - guitarists Jack Simmons, and Dmitry Mamedov, bassist Mikhail Petrov, and drummer Evgeny Novikov - deserve their due as well. With an album like this, Slaughter To Prevail is sure to bring deathcore to the masses. Now we’re getting somewhere.
