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SADIST
Something To Pierce

Agonia (2025)
Rating: 5/10

My interest in this Italian band stems from their 1993 debut album Against The Light, but due to the onset of the mid-90s my interest evaporated rather rapidly. It’s strange then that a few decades later that Sadist are treading the groove metal boards somewhat with this, their tenth full-length opus.

With the title track opening up proceedings I found myself loitering in Pantera waters with the chunky chugs and general groove. Boasting an urban, streetcore toughness the song somewhat annoys and entertains at the same time as frontman Trevor Nadir growls and snaps over the rather harmless yet infectious stop-start trudging.

If you’re familiar with Sadist then you’ll know that they’ve always had a penchant for experimentation, and that continues here with atmospheric opening throbs of ‘Deprived’ matched only by the unorthodox tinkering on ‘The Best Part Is The Brain’ where guitarist Tommy Talamanca comes into his own before the busy riff ensues.

Sadist can be classed as a progressive outfit at times, a band which sacrifices extremity for the sake of a more accessible sound even with its guttural bellows. The experimental side comes to the fore again, and more so, on ‘Kill Devour Dissect’ which, in its speediness, nods towards a contemporary melodeath dynamic, but further probing reveals an almost nu-metal aesthetic alongside a steady death metal style. Such subtlety and nodding doesn’t always work, but when it does you are treated to a mighty slab such as ‘The Sun God’ where the mid-tempo riffs work well with the punchy keyboard injections.

More stripped back barrages also exist within as Sadist embark upon ‘One Shot Closer’ and ‘No Feast For Flies’, although the Middle Eastern flavours of ‘Nova Strade’ initially entertain before the controlled bludgeoning. Even so, this is not an album that provides much joy, the band instead operating in the doldrums of death metal in spite of the creative flair.

In a sense this is a record that just refuses to flow and that’s not down to any particular cold intricacy or over-thinking, instead it’s all rather bland and a bit uneventful. Combining a mid-to-later death metal style with experimental flourishes sounds like a good idea, but in reality Sadist just doesn’t know what it wants to be, even to this day, and by the time the album finishes I’m left feeling at odds with the whole thing.

Neil Arnold

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