Death/Groove Metal
 Poland

Released 30th January, 2026

 Ah, the mega highway that is “groove”.
 Where does one definitively put a finger on that term in terms of metal music?

 It seems absolutely anywhere and everywhere, but things get blurry when defining it as a sound. Yes, it refers to the ‘feel’ you get… from Black Sabbath, to the early 90s breakout of Pantera and Machine Head. Meanwhile, entire sub genres like stoner and sludge demand it. Also, it’s found in Obituary’s murky death metal, Heartwork era Carcass and Decapitated’s more modern death metal take on groove.

 To pigeonhole groove is sonically impossible, yet, somehow we all kind of get it.
 Speaking of Decapitated. Fellow Polish denizens, BANISHER are the latest to give a more techdeath twist to groove metal. A point made even more obvious, considering that BANISHER’s guitarist, Hubert Więcek, spent 4 years playing bass for Decapitated, during the band’s ‘Anticult’ era.

 BANISHER’s fifth album, METAMORPHOSIS, is a mild shift from the previous album, Degrees Of Isolation, although it is not obvious until further into it.

The opening tracks are taught, blast fueled diatribes of demise, but the groove really hits home on AFTERMATH. A stupidly addictive chromatic chord structure runs in front of sinewy, sweaty drumming.

 It’s a theme that continues into the title track. Here offered in two parts, or flavours if you will, as BANISHER experimented with another approach to the same basic song structure. The first harks to those mid-noughties bands like Chimaira & Romeo Must Die. All dancefloor destroying and fit for festival pits, while part two takes on a strangely Slipknot style nu metal gait. An off-kilter approach that took a couple of goes before I “got” it and dug it.

 BORN TO DIE brings us back to earth with a technical, thrashy blast feast. It hits hard and proves another highlight.
 By the end, SOUL DEFORMED gives a lesson in eurocentric death metal in the vein of Carcass. Its breathless urgency and blindingly skilled execution urges a replay of the whole album again and again.

 As groove metal goes, this is textbook stuff, whereas, here, BANISHER have gifted us with more than a few extra pages slipped in as refinement. It may very well have that “groove”, but METAMORPHOSIS is in no way stuck in a rut. A true exploration for the feel of it.

METAMORPHOSIS by BANISHER is available now via Selfmadegod Records. You can stream it from the usual places or visit their Bandcamp for physical and digital copies.