CARCASS Surgical Steel CD (2013)

Retirement didn't suit them. After a decade-plus away, Carcass came back in 2013 not to cash in on nostalgia but to write one of the sharpest melodic death metal records of the century. Surgical Steel landed like a scalpel, precise and absolutely merciless.

If you know your Carcass history, you know this is the band that essentially invented goregrind, then pivoted to melodeath so good that half the genre spent the nineties trying to copy Heartwork. Surgical Steel sits closer to that era, all hooky riffs and surgical (yes, literally) song construction, but with a nastiness that reminds you these are still the same lads who named songs after medical procedures. A landmark return from Liverpool's most anatomically literate extreme metal band.

CD, full length album, UK pressing, 2013. Melodic death metal / goregrind.

Fans of: Morbid Angel, Bolt Thrower, Obituary, Deicide, Napalm Death, Vader, Death.