Hey. I am feeling under the weather once again. Sorry. Sucks. This intro is an expanded and updated version of an intro I wanted to run last year but banished to personal blog purgatory instead. I’ve got some good stuff brewing for the next couple months.

Gather ‘round, I am going to tell you the best running joke in goregrind. Like all good jokes, it, ahem, requires a long setup? And, uh, I’m going to need your help with the punchline? We’ll get to that. First, though, there’s this band named Last Days Of Humanity.

On its early recordings, the Dutch institution moistened a then-inchoate goregrind substyle. As LDOH (d)evolved, they would end up pioneering a variant that I’ve lovingly described as “ultra ping turbo goregrind.” At the time, that mix of brown-note timbres, stupidly fast pinging drums, and straight-up noise sounded like the end of metal, the very edge of what this genre could produce. And it was the end, for LDOH at least. Their 2006 swansong, the absolutely bonkers Putrefaction in Progress, described as “Reign In Blood for goregrind,” ending up blasting the band to bits.

Now, LDOH are back. They rejoin a scene that includes a more experimental, gooey form that glooped forth in LDOH’s absence, a form that found a way to continually iterate upon and redefine what I once considered a dead end, the mountaintop for metal’s escalation of extremity. Some of those obsessives have got some real good jokes, too. But in order to get the gag, and figure out why there are obsessives in the first place, you need to get LDOH. And to get LDOH, we need to start at the beginning of the last days.

“[In] Autumn 1989, Erwin (de Wit) and me (Hans) often came together in Soos Plock,” LDOH co-founder Hans Smits told Braindead Zine in 2008, “that was [and] still is a sort of youth center where you could hang out, drink a lot of beer, and see some cool bands.” Those bands? “Blood, Agathocles, and Dreft.” Further inspired by Fear Of God, Napalm Death, and other early grinders, Smits and de Wit wanted to make their own racket. They wouldn’t have to wait long for their chance.

“When Erwin organized a gig with Drudge, Agathocles, and some other bands [on] December 30, 1989 in Plock, he saw the opportunity to add our own noise project to the bill,” Smits said. “Last Days Of Humanity was born.”

But LDOH wasn’t quite … LDOH yet. “Last Days Of Humanity at this time consisted of only two singers (Erwin and Hans),” Smits remembered. “The ‘music’ was made by two screaming voices that were deformed by a guitar pitch-shifter.” Imagine that at karaoke.

Following its dueling-gurgle live debut, LDOH eventually expanded into a band, releasing a self-titled demo in 1992. It’s … rough. And not in a good way. Future drummer Marc Palmen once referred to this era as “the worst crap even I have ever heard!”

Still, amid the mess, Smits unlocked a key ingredient of the LDOH sound. “I came across a Digitech Whammy FX pedal that could bring down the vocals with one or two octaves,” Smits said to Braindead. “Man, this is what I was looking for, vocals that sounded like a screaming pig!” In a 2015 interview with Good Guys Go Grind, he detailed the settings: “I put this device on 75 percent of one octave down, so not too low because then you get a more ‘round’ sound and I like the sharp edges on the vocals. Also, I not only do deep growls, but also high-pitched screams, and if that goes through that Whammy, you get a very nice effect.”

The nice effects started to show on LDOH’s second demo, Human Atrocity. For one, it has songs. And it gave the group something to build upon. And build they did. Over the next few years, LDOH streamlined their sound by churning through EPs and splits, eventually recording The Sound Of Rancid Juices Sloshing Around Your Coffin, their debut full-length, in 1996. (Starting here, assume every link in the remainder of this intro is NSFW/life due to gnarly gore artwork.) Smits on vocals, de Wit on bass, Anne van de Burgt and William van de Ven on guitars, and Glenn Jagers on drums. Thanks to a dodgy label deal, it sat on the shelf until 1998 when it was rescued by France’s Bones Brigade Records.

The reason Coffin works better than its predecessors is because it sprints foolhardily in two opposing directions. On the one hand, it’s brutal, blasty, and gutter-gunk disgusting. On the other, it has legit hooks, pushing the catchiness to the forefront.

In that way, Coffin fit in with the burgeoning goregrind sound that burbled up like a clogged drain after Carcass and their followers like General Surgery, Necrony, and Pathologist. In place of those bands’ cutting proto-melo eruptions, LDOH and their peers preferred more of the mincecore of Agathocles, punkiness of Autopsy, and gravediggers-on-a-humid-day stench of Repulsion. The riffs are rounder, more leaden, favoring the same drinking-song hummability present in two other landmarks: Dead Infection’s A Chapter Of Accidents (1995) and Regurgitate’s Effortless Regurgitation Of Bright Red Blood (1994).

But there’s something else within Coffin, an irresistible blood lust for metallic noise and campy, pitch-shifted roars. You can hear it in the Impetigo-esque blast n’ grooves: LDOH has riffs and LDOH loves that it has riffs. Simple, headbangable, immediate riffs. And, the band wasn’t coy about where it sourced some of those riffs.

“The first track on the CD sounds a lot like Swiss [band] Exulceration,” a zine writer named “Martin/Gowap” asked in this old scan. “Aren’t you afraid that other people are going to see Last Days … as a band who stole other band’s ideas?” “Yes, that’s true,” Smits answered, “it’s some kind of tribute to them as you can read on our thanx list. It’s not a cover, but we used one of their godly riffs. And no, I don’t think that people are going to say that we stole something ’cause if you listen good to other grindcore bands, than you always hear riffs from Napalm Death and Repulsion.”

(Two things: (1) Jeez, did time ever forget Exulceration. 20 years after they broke up, their best work was finally released as a 2012 split with Embalming Theatre. (2) That same zine includes this priceless riposte from Smits: “Well, Last Days’ main influences today are mostly grindcore and brutal death metal. I haven’t got any lyrics. I just growl something with lots of gggrrrlllzzz and aaaarrrrgggghhhh, but the growls in a song are always the same.”)

That accessible simplicity, along with the odd hand-me-down riff, might be a byproduct of the time crunch that the band experienced while recording Coffins. Smits, to Braindead: “Somewhere in 1996 we got our first record deal! Who could imagine that! We booked two studio days to record our first album. On the first day Erwin forgot to take his bass guitar to the studio. Luckily, he didn’t forget his beer. After one day of recording, we only got something like 12 minutes of music, way too short for a full-length CD. We had a problem: We had to come up with about 18 minutes of new material in less than 24 hours! But hey, for professional musicians like us that was no problem. The next day, the rest of the album was recorded.”

In 2000, the professionals released their sophomore LP, Hymns Of Indigestible Suppuration. The album mirrors its truly gross art, a literal blown mind, exponentially expanding upon Coffin. The blasts are more blasty, the gurgles more gurgley, but LDOH still hangs its depravity upon hooks. That said, it sounds like a different band. It kind of was. Smits left to take over his dad’s business and was replaced by Bart Bouwmans; Anne van de Burgt was out on guitar; and, perhaps most crucially, Marc Palmen assumed drum duties from Jagers, who left to join the Hells Angels.

Personnel flux would be nothing new for LDOH. Their Discogs page lists 20 members. (Encyclopaedia Metallum won’t accept LDOH for … reasons. I’m over it. It’s their site.) However, it never seemed to have a diminishing effect. If anything, the new blood only seemed to hasten the band’s evolution.

“LDOH had many line-up changes but 90 percent of the members are close friends,” Smits told Braindead, “they almost all left in good friendship and most of the members and ex-members saw each other every week at the local bar or at gigs. With new members there were new influences.”

Those new influences manifested in a commitment to get noisier. Across a series of splits, the most notable being the exposure-broadening Dutch Assault that was released by Relapse Records, LDOH slowly turned the dials towards 11. And then came The Xtc Of Swallowing L.D.O.H. Feaces, the band’s 2004 live album. At this point, the outfit was out of original members, with Palmen and Van de Ven being the lone vets and remaining links to the past. Joining them were Erwin De Groot on borks, Bas van Geffen on guitar, and Rogier Kuzee on bass and secondary vocals. Not only is Xtc noisier, it’s nuttier.

You can hear the difference between this LDOH and the old LDOH on “48th Cut,” provided that you can hear anything on Xtc at all. The Hymns version is 75 seconds of chunky grooves with some light blast seasoning. Xtc tears through the track in 25 seconds, layering vocals like they’re a second set of guitars. The big thing, though, is that the song is now driven by Palmen’s need for speed and his buckshot-on-steel-drum snare tone. Ping.

That glorious ping took center stage on the band’s next work, 2005’s In Advanced Haemorrhaging Conditions. Ten tracks, a touch over seven minutes, with a significant chunk of that runtime given over to samples from Bleeders, a schlocky B-flick starring Rutger Hauer.

Shrinking back down to a quartet after van Geffen’s brief exit, LDOH transferred their Xtc live sound to the studio. The jet-engine stage mix was given some depth thanks to Oscar Broekhuizen’s mastering. That said, the guitar and bass are pretty much there solely as a texture. Instead of LDOH’s riffs, you now key into two things: Palmen’s aggressive, manic drumming and the vocal hooks.

As a classic example of the latter, check out the burping vocal break on the 12-second “Fungating Sexual Orifice.” “Ree ree ree ree BRAP BRAP.” It sticks in your head, like the way a good MC can wiggle an earworm into your brain with only a vocal cadence. Palmen’s drumming, too, is suffused with a kind of drumline catchiness, where his blasts key into extremely tappable rhythms. I can’t recall the amount of times one of his blasts has surfaced in my subconscious.

What always grabs my attention is the way the drumming plus the three vocalists unite to form some neat polyrhythms. In Advanced Haemorrhaging Conditions is not technical, per se, although it would be hard to cover it. But it is adventurous in the way it plops many rhythms on top of one another. It’s like the goregrind equivalent of xenochrony, though I expect that all of these songs are actually fairly composed. In my mind, it’s the band’s masterwork. It might’ve push this version of LDOH past their breaking point. In order to finish their next record, LDOH needed some help from their past.

“Yes, then Putrefaction in Progress happened,” Smits told Le Scribe Du Rock in 2019. “They recorded the album without me, without vocals. When the album was ready (rough mix), they came to me with the question if I could do the vocals. It would be vocals for the album only, no gigs or tour. The was the last thing Last Days would do. After that they would split up. Everybody had enough of it. Bones Brigade Records asked if they could do just one last studio album. So they did. They wanted to do one last killer release that would blast everything away. When I heard what they recorded, I was super excited. This what I wanted to create in 1989 but did not have the resources to do. Now I had the opportunity. When the album was completed, I was very happy with the result. This was so fucking brutal without being just some random noise. Somebody told me once ‘this is the Reign in Blood for goregrind, the most brutal album there is.’ I must say I felt honored.”

As an exercise in ridiculousness, it’s hard to top Putrefaction. Forty-one tracks, with the closer, “A Divine Proclamation Of Finishing The Present Existence,” running a particularly batshit three minutes and 11 seconds. Play fast, die young, leave one hell of a mutilated corpse.

Of course, like metal legends before and since, LDOH wouldn’t stay dead for long. In 2010, they reformed for festivals, hitting the Obscene Extreme stage the next year with Melanie Stamp on bass. It didn’t mind updating their discography, either, cleaning the decks of leftover material from the Putrefaction sessions and packaging it in splits with FUBAR and PLF. And then, last year, LDOH resurfaced with new material.

“The songs we now have are somewhere in between of The Sound Of Rancid Juices and Putrefaction In Progress,” Smits said. A three-way split with two bands with names I won’t try to enter into the Stereogum tag database (is this … adulthood?) was released in March 2020 and offered a preview. LDOH’s side, and their side alone, is pretty good. The band — now Smits (vocals), Bas van Geffen (guitar/bass), and Paul Niessen (Drums) — is back to a groovier, riffier basic goregrind sound. I will pitch you “Ectomy Of Festering Misogyny Excrement From Life,” which is just good advice all around, really.

(While LDOH has occasionally dipped into a couple song titles/split partners that sit uncomfortably close to the hateful garbage that’s endemic in sketchier parts of the scene, Smits’ stints, as shown by the song title above, are better than most in that regard. Still, it’s a low bar. Metal, particularly this branch of metal, has earned its rep thanks to a persistent infestation of dipshit Seth Putnams. The virulent incel sector of pornogrind should be launched into the sun. I hate it. I don’t think anyone should be asked to tolerate it. For what it’s worth, I think of Smits’ LDOH as more of an outgrowth of the punk/crust that birthed Napalm Death, Carcass, Agathocles, Nuclear Death, etc. I might be naive. That’s to say, I try to catch this stuff and sometimes don’t. No excuses. I’m happy to be fact-checked on it.)

A LDOH comeback full-length, tentatively titled Compositions Of Decomposition, was planned for 2020, but hasn’t hit the streets yet. In the interim, other DOHers have tried to fill the gap.

Oh, yeah. The running joke. Here we go.

First Days Of Humanity released Caves in February 2019. The Phoenix-based project — featuring Tapo, a member of Oozing Pus and Bouquet, the Victory Garden of goregrind bands — dragged LDOH back to prehistory. Over 13 subsequent releases, FDOH has offered some curveballs, such as the Atari/NES-inspired Pixel Death EPs and the solo piano(!) excursions of Somewhat Discernible Forms and Towering Entity Of Relentless Joy. (I think At Melancholy’s Edifice is a harpsichord.) But, for the most part, it sticks to the bit: early hominid goregrind. Its December 2020 winter-themed split with Costectomy is the best the band has sounded, racing towards Putrefaction speeds while two additional vocalists spew their guts.

First? Check. Last? Check. Hm. Last month, Empty Inside’s Pedro Bezerra Machado dropped Holy Inquisition, the debut of Middle Days Of Humanity. “MIDDLE AGE THEMED GOREGRIND From Fortaleza-CE, Brazil,” goes the bio. This one is more Coffins/Hymns in sound, exploring an Inquisition torture theme that would make Brodequin and Baalsebub proud.

Needless to say, I am here for these DOH punchlines. Extremely my shit. And here’s what I’m thinking: Readers, we can probably crowdsource another DOH. Your old helmsman, Doug Moore, has already offered Mondays Of Humanity, Garfield Minus Garfield goregrind blasting away about the iniquities of the worst day of the workweek. Frequent Black Market interviewee Avinash Mittur added that the album cover should be a destroyed plate of lasagna. If Exhumed is reading this, maybe it’s time to resurrect Gorefield? If you got something better, definitely put it in the comments. Because, really, it has never been a better time to be into goo.

While ultra ping turbo goregrind has always had its creative side and its share of characters willing to go the extra blargh, such as Big Frog’s “amphibian worshiping” Phyllomedusa and Mulk’s haunted-modem cybergrind freakout, a number of recent albums have also been pushing the boundaries that LDOH initially set, both on the fun, why-not side and the stomach-churning, horrifying side.

As an example of the former, there’s MOVIEREVIEW, Colin Marston’s blown-out ode to cinema. Liner notes: “all lyrics by RogerEbert.com.” It sounds like At The Movies was filmed on the deck of the Event Horizon. Then, there are the projects under the ЅⱣДҀЄↁФЦГ ΛВӘ umbrella. That Bandcamp includes Royal Jelly, pinging blasts about bees (whispers softly: the bees are back, the bees are back), and ΔΔΔ, which combines ultra ping with vaporwave. Finally, if you liked the ostrich-themed brutal death metal of Shinda Saibo No Katamari, flick your tongue at Komodonesia, an Indonesian one-man-band that channels the psyche of Komodo dragons.

If you prefer something more primal, we’ve covered two in the past. Sulfuric Cautery, an all-in grinder from Dayton, Ohio, that began blasting in 2015, made my year-end list in 2019 on the strength of Chainsaws Clogged With The Underdeveloped Brain Matter Of Xenophobes. (Also solid advice.) That one featured the physics-defying playing of drummer Isaac Horne, who laid out his ping approach in a 2018 interview with Procrastinate Zine:

Step 1: Acquire a snare made of metal, preferably a large deep one.
Step 2: Put a clear head on it. Coated heads sound too traditional and not annoying enough.
Step 3: Tune the top head up as tight as you physically can.
Step 4: Get someone stronger than you to tune it EVEN TIGHTER!
Step 5: Don’t be a featherblaster!!!

Sulfuric Cautery just cut a split with Cystgurgle, a tinnitus-inducing duo from Thailand. Early appraisal: Rips. I hope we’ll be talking more about it soon. No featherblasting there.

The other band we covered was Naegleria Fowleri, the Russian nutters with members of Bowel Leakage and Hydrocele. I described Odes To The Adorable Essence Of Putrefaction, Naegleria Fowleri’s full-length debut, as “finding a way to inject hooks into the chaos where you’d least expect them.” I took particular note of drummer Aleksej Popov, who “can do the requisite speedy blasts, but his drumming is also delightfully loose and … dare I say … groovy?” If anything, Odes should go viral as a test of endurance. To me? It demonstrated that, even at the edge of metal, there’s still a lot left to explore. —Ian Chainey