DEARTH
Oakland’s Dearth appeared in the Bay Area’s extreme metal undreground around 2016, coalescing around members from local extreme metal deviants like Xenotaph, Torture Chamber, Dead Man, Swamp Witch, and Funeral Chant who wanted to explore an abominable syncretism between the ugliness and surrealism of French black metal, the power and chaos of the darkest strains of death metal, and conceptual lyricism and symbolism dealing with transcendental misanthropy, metaphysical nihilism and total inhumanity. The band debuted in 2017 with a debut tape EP released by Transylvanian Tapes which already put on full display their monstrous sound made of a cascading wall of bludgeoning death metal riffs draped in malefic and sickening black atmospheres borrowed directly from the fringe outer limits of the most tortured french black metal. Following their debut tape release the band lay mostly dormant playing locally only sporadicly and hammering away at what would become To Crown All Befoulment, their monstrous 2020 debut album for Sentient Ruin. With a sound both reminiscent of dark death metal monsters like Dead Congregation, Lucifyre, and Pseudogod, and of extreme black metal entities like Deadthspell Omega, Aosoth, and Anteus, with To Crown All Befoulment Dearth have levitated from the depths of hell and spread the enormous wings of a sonic holocaust of unseen dread and destructiveness, claiming their rightful place at the very center of contemporary blackened death metal transformation, and adding their own inestimable touch to a transformative and ever changing syncretism of styles which is in constant motion and evolution.