Do you hear those distant cries? The roar of thunder and the clap of cracking earth? It is the sounds of Rio de Janeiro’s Whipstriker stirring from their keep, rising like a Chthonic deity with the girth of a mountain, returning to the surface world after a deathly slumber in order to devour the living and raise the unconsecrated dead. And to make matters worse, they’re bringing along their pales, the Canadian glacial gladiators Ice War. It’s not every day that the metal underground gives birth to such a momentous occasion, but when it does happen, it’s worth marking the day and praying to whatever god you still have a dim sense of faith in.
In case you’ve been sheltered your entire puny existence and don’t already know, Whipstriker are a ghoul-face incarnation of ire sired in the black pits that fester in the lightless interior of first-wave black metal’s soul. They’re like the band Venom seemed to be training to become on At War with Satan, or reconstituted Sabbat freshly healed after being maimed during a Satanic mass, interrupted by a local manufacturer illegally dumping toxic waste into the woodland ravine where they were holding their ritual.
Ice War for their part, takes the traditional sounds of Teutonic speed and unleashes them with loose, punky energy, wrapped in a gothic affect, sounding a little like Helloween fronted by Bauhuse’s Peter Murphy, or like freshly transformed vampiric Thor attempting to rally an army of crust punks to raid city hall. An appropriate minstral accompaniment to a tundra dredging barbarian hoard if there ever was one.
Together these punk-metal mutants have blown the doors off of their respective crypts to meet in the middle of a sawtoothed split that will herald an abrupt end to your daily doldrums (and possibly your life as well).
You stream the entirety of Whipstriker / Ice War’s split below via Bandcamp:
The split is out via Helldprod Records. You can pick it up on CD and Cassette here.
