Florence, Italy, is not your typical location for heart-splitting, skin-peeling, soul-crushing grimness. The legendary Italian city, shrouded in it’s timeless artistic beauty, gorgeous skyline and breath-taking tuscan setting is far from what you would perceive as a place where death and destruction reign unchallenged. But that is only true until you run into the music of MACERIE (the name in Italian translates to “ruins”), a newly formed band from Florence that has made a statement of immeasurable sonic hostility with the birth of their debut offering, a work that will strangle the listener in an absolute ordeal of crushing heaviness and harrowing aggression.
Coming virtually out of nowhere, Macerie have set on a mission to hollow your soul out with their life-draining music. The first offering of theirs comes in the form of a sixteen-minute bestial EP containing four savage tracks of crust and death metal-infested blackened sludge that bring to mind the likes of Entombed, Amebix, Burzum, and His Hero Is Gone, all fused together into one hideous sonic monstrosity. Showcasing similarities to blackened, epic crushers like Altar of Plagues, Planks, Celeste, Hexis, Acephalix, Coffinworm and Downfall of Gaia, Macerie are purveyors of a view of the world so grim, suffocating and wretched that as you sit down and listen to their music you will literally feel the light being sucked away from your surroundings and your world turning into a grim and shadowy twilight, as a cold and inescapable downfall of bestial and absolutely crushing riffs annihilate everything.
