There is something genuinely unpleasant about Thy Art Is Murder. The Sydney deathcore quintet’s music is an unrelenting, tireless attrition of brutality and aggro, a migraine of sound, almost produced not to make the heaviness sound sonically weighty, but for maximum abrasion – to make it all tickle parts of the ear and the brain not usually touched by music and scratch meathooks down them. And there seems to be no levity or relief in unity with it, either; everything is mired in a negativity that, rather than being something to overcome, is instead spat upon repeatedly with a knowledge that things aren’t going to be getting much better and there’s no point saying otherwise. And as with the similarly minded Nails, Full Of Hell or All Pigs Must Die, there isn’t a shred of banter or shared, ...
