No band has flipped death metal on its deformed head like Defeated Sanity. The band’s uniquely potent concoction of punishing technical proficiency and jazz-infused chaos has delighted metalheads from their familial beginnings in Berlin to Maryland Deathfest and India. Now, after breaking onto the Billboard charts with their last album, these underground champions are returning to the brutal slamming that cemented their legacy.
“Chronicles of Lunacy is not only a must buy”, writes New Noise. “It’s one of the top death metal records of 2024. All hail Defeated Sanity”.
Chronicles of Lunacy comes out tomorrow, Friday, November 22 on Season of Mist, but you can hear all eight rip-roaring songs today by listening to the full album stream on the Season of Mist YouTube channel.
Listen
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https://orcd.co/defeatedsanitythecroniclesoflunacy
Get a guided tour through the album’s brutal passages by talking to the band tomorrow on the r/Metal subreddit.
Defeated Sanity Chronicles of Lunacy AMA
Friday, November 22
3pm Eastern Time
https://www.reddit.com/r/Metal/
Chronicles of Lunacy punches you right in the face. Opener “Amputationsdrang” already has you pinned to the mat beneath its non-stop blasts. Get comfortable, too. Defeated Sanity don’t let the album up for air until “Temporal Disintegration” warps into a wiggling bass outro.
“We love experimenting”, explains drummer and founding member Lille Gruber. “But we realized that some of our oldest fans might have gotten lost after our last couple of albums. With Chronicles of Lunacy, we wanted to focus more on neck-snapping brutality”.
Acting like cavemen isn’t so easy when your band has a Mensa-level maestro like Gruber at the controls. “Lille’s drumming is just ridiculous”, says bassist Jacob Schmidt. Whether Gruber is hammering his snare, pinging between cymbals or riding a colossal groove, Chronicles of Lunacy flows like a never-ending stream of filth. Lead single “The Odour of Sanctity” opens like he’s puncturing a wound with blistering blast beats, only to spew over into a monstrously wonky syncopated stomp.
“He’s the face of the franchise, so we’re never going to abandon those head-scratching moments that set Defeated Sanity apart”, Schmidt continues.
Indeed, Chronicles of Lunacy isn’t Defeated Sanity for dummies. “Each song deals with a different form of mental corruption”, vocalist Josh Welshman says. “Odour” stinks of religious fanaticism. Early crowd favorite “A Patriarchy Perverse” cracks open the mind of co-ed killer Ed Kemper. “Sickness breeding sickness“, Welshman growls with guttural vengeance.
While it still hits from every odd angle, Chronicles of Lunacy does draw a jagged red line back to Defeated Sanity’s brutal origins. After all, the band now share a label with their namesake. New guitarist Vaughn Stoffey’s chunky finger taps whip “Accelerating the Rot” into the fastest song in DS history. “This album is rawer and more straightforward”, Stoffey says. “It gets back to what people love about Psalms of the Moribund and Chapters of Repugnance“.
To dig up the sheer brutality that long-time fans have come to crave, Defeated Sanity returned to Thousand Cave Studios. The underground hot spot served as the excavation site for their previous two albums, but with Chronicles of Lunacy, producer Colin Marston was encouraged to really get his hands dirty. “We still wanted some of the high fidelity that you hear on modern death metal records”, Schmidt says, “but this album also has the old school’s crushing low-end”.
The band execute this two-headed approach to monstrous effect on “Condemned to Vascular Famine”. At just under six minutes, the song delivers the longest ass beating on Chronicles of Lunacy. At times, all four members sound like they’re climbing up the walls in separate asylums, but after slipping in a brief nod to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the band come slamming down into the album’s ugliest breakdown.
“That’s one of our favorites”, the band says. “It lands at a crossroad of the DS sound that we ended up with on Chronicles of Lunacy. Even though it gets pretty fucking weird at times, there’s still an emphasis on heavy, straight-up slamming”
They’re never going to drag their knuckles in a straight line, but on Chronicles of Lunacy, Defeated Sanity return to sheer brutality.
More advanced praise for Chronicles of Lunacy
“Thirty years into their career – German death metal group Defeated Sanity have lost none of their fire” – Bandcamp
“…will become a new favorite among the fanbase” – Lambgoat
“Defeated Sanity was and continues to be a definitive Final Boss in brutal death metal” – Last Rites
“Chronicles of Lunacy sounds more in line with Psalms of the Moribund in that it is a direct and unyielding assault” – Pop Matters
“A brutal and unique effort” – Technical Music Review
“…pure deliverance of what Death Metal stands for” – Metal Temple
“Defeated Sanity continue to push at the very limit of what is achievable within the confines of the genre” – Metalwani
“Defeated Sanity continue to defend their title as a group that effortlessly blends elements from all across the death metal board and merge them into a cohesive and memorable beast” – Dead Rhetoric
“We continue to see a band who will not get lumped into a box and release the same album again, and even when they look to take a lead from the earlier stages in their career, we are given a fresh and exciting take on that musical path and that is what legends are made of” – The Razors Edge
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