Audio By Carbonatix
High priests of Florida’s legendary death-metal scene alongside Death and Deicide, the members of Obituary have been grinding morbidity and decay into heavy, guttural masterpieces since their seminal 1989 album, Slowly We Rot, a disc that helped define the genre and lock it forever into the metal pantheon. After a hiatus in the late ’90s and early ’00s — during which drummer Donald Tardy popped up in Andrew W.K.’s band — Obituary reformed to release a string of surprisingly excellent discs, including this year’s Darkest Day. Rather than dallying with the slick production and tech-obsessed precision of much of today’s extreme metal, tracks like the blistering, aptly named “List of Dead” are throwbacks to the group’s uncompromising heyday, steeped in the kind of stiff-armed, murderous, too-evil-to-Auto-Tune attack that it pioneered.
