DEADGUY – Return after 30 years with new album Near-Death Travel Services

After infamous metalcore pioneers DEADGUY reunited on stage in 2021 to prove that a few decades of dust couldn’t keep them from tearing into audiences like old times. But there’s a big difference between playing the classics for nostalgic fans and risking your legacy with a new album. The band innately understood how heavy and deranged a follow-up would need to be – and that’s exactly what they bring with their new album Near-Death Travel Services incoming June 27 via Relapse Records [pre-order].

Recorded in fits and starts over a matter of months, 11 songs made the cut to be mixed, mastered and aimed indiscriminately at an unsuspecting public under the banner of Near-Death Travel Services. Members, at once skeptical, were finally able to take in the whole thing and had the same opinion after digesting their creation: “We made a fucking Deadguy record.”

From the first enraged scream that ignites first single / album opener “Kill Fee,” this is the kind of merciless chaos that’s been gone far too long. The record is overflowing with angular riffs, clashing guitars, fractured rhythms and gutter bass that no one does better, but with even more red meat and gristle. Instead of moving away from their sound they’ve dug in deeper, expanding their songs and giving Tim Singer more room to again show why he’s been one of the best vocalists in extreme music since the first Bush administration.

Near-Death Travel Services is an inside joke, the band reflecting on touring and playing this music when they’re ostensibly past their prime. But there are no signs of this being a swansong; no winding down, no taking it easy or resting on their laurels. The band Deadguy went into hibernation 30 years ago and came back as if no time had passed. How did it happen? How were they able to pull it off? Maybe some egghead professor of musicology can figure that out, but for the rest of us it’s best to just gratefully sit back and enjoy the massacre.