We’re proud to bring you the immense third full-length album in thirty five years from Chile's legendary thrash legion Apostasy, finally reissued for the first time ever with proper vinyl mastering from the source mixes and with a brand new graphic layout. "Death Return" vinyl is available now on limited edition neon yellow vinyl and standard black vinyl via all our channels for North America and via Fallen Temple in Europe.
The unchallenged sonic assault sees the Chilean masters rise to unseen peaks of excellence and destruction as they unleash the most towering and punishing beast in their three-decade-plus career and harness the quintessence of total thrash domination. This is not only the glorious past of speed metal's finest hour reclaiming its darkened throne, but the future of the genre all together. A dark future in which thrash metal reconnects with its evil and nefarious roots to summon complete hell on earth and reignite the black flame first sparked by bands like Slayer, Sodom and Sepultura back in the mid 80s when the genre was still very much a vessel for apocalyptic visions of a world drowned in blood, war, violence and evil. In a perfect and flawless forty-minute assault of war-torn aggression and shellshocking intensity, Apostasy deliver an absolute payload of death and terror, discharged at breakneck speed and weaponized into form by an implacable firestorm of blackened riffs, ominous atmospheres, razowrire leads and malefic screams ripping from he bowels of hell.
"Best kept secret" or "underrated" are terms too easy to toss around when it comes to Chile's legendary thrash legion Apostasy. All of those remain understatements that don't even begin to describe the true power and brilliance of one of South America's greatest ever underground metal bands, and conversely, the unacceptable and unexplainable lack of broader recognition they've struggled with over the decades. Apostasy emerged in the late 80s from Chile's metal underworld with a dark and evil trash assault which was perhaps even too ahead of its time and uncompromising for the time and place in which it emerged. Reminiscent of darker practitioners like (early) Sepultura, Slayer, Sodom, Kreator, Destruction etc, Apostasy have always treaded the outlines of the extreme, carving out a recognizable identity for themselves by always keeping a foot in the occult and esoteric shadow of black and death metal while staying true to thrash metal's militarized and belligerent ways as we've come to know it through its western most popular acts. The band's origins and first era can be traced back to the early frontline of Chile's Valparaíso metal scene in late 80's, in an epoch in which thrash was still a rising new threat traveling at supersonic speed on the heels of the success of Slayer's and Metallica's first legendary albums from the mid 80's. Apostasy's first incarnation emerged spearheaded by multi-instrumentalist Cristián Silva in the wake of this metal renaissance ignited by the legendary first ever thrash wave, a short yet fruitful burst which culminated and ended with the 1991 debut album "Sunset of the End", after which the band dissolved into the same obscurity it had emerged from, living almost literally by by thrash's infamous dogma: live fast, die young. Thirty years later, Silva decided that Apostasy hadn't quite said everything it had originally been created for, so he assembled a new lineup and initiated the band's triumphant return from the shadows of oblivion, issuing a string of demos before returning in 2018 with its sophomore comeback album, "The Sign of Darkness", a wrathful and weaponized speed metal beast that saw the band full-frontally embrace the darkest fringes of extreme metal while elevating its ancestral trash identity to a new modern height of destructiveness. How the band could demonstrate to be a vanguard at the forefront of trash transformation across three decades is anyone's guess, but despite its long hiatus it was as if the band had never ceased to exist, and at its every (re)emergence Apostasy demonstrated that no matter the era it was active in, it always represented and stood by the the genre's most uncompromising and visionary underground fringe. In 2020 "The Unknown Path" EP followed (self-released by the band on cassette and reissued on cassette in 2022 by Sentient Ruin for western audiences) showcasing a more meticulous approach to production and an even more pronounced convergence from traditional thrash toward the darker spectrum of black and speed metal. This EP was essentially a premonition to the band's most triumphant and dominating work, "Death Return", a new 2021 full-length offering which saw Apostasy fully morphed into an otherworldly dark speed metal fire-breathing beast. Fusing the unforgettable wrath of Slayer, early Sepultura and Sodom with the obscure and malevolent crafts of Chile's contemporary and now flourishing underground death and and black metal cults, "Death Return" emerged from the South American extreme metal underground like a dark weapon of total annihilation, standing tall as one of the greatest accomplishments in modern thrash, and as one of the greatest South American underground thrash records in recent years.