There’s a particular kind of violence that extreme metal has long been comfortable depicting—the moment of impact, the spectacle of rupture. Lividus are not especially interested in that moment. On Scarabaeus, their first full-length, the Portland collective turn instead toward what follows: the slow, corrosive work of living with the damage left behind. It’s a shift in focus that gives the record its weight—not immediate, but cumulative, lingering.

The band came together less as a formal project than as a shared impulse. “It was just the two of us when it started,” vocalist and violist Uta Plotkin explains, tracing the origins to 2017 with bassist Connie Wang. Both wanted to make something heavier, more extreme, yet less predictable than what surrounded them. What followed was a slow process of assembly—finding the right players, the right chemistry, and the right balance between structure and instability. That process culminates on Scarabaeus, released April 17 via Nameless Grave Records, while the current lineup—including guitarists Rob Shaffer and Christy Cather and drummer Michael Thompson—continues to expand the band’s scope beyond the recorded material.

Adventurous, Weird—and Deliberate

The band’s self-described label—“adventurous, weird metal”—isn’t marketing shorthand so much as a working principle. For Wang, it begins with a broad palette: “We all have pretty eclectic tastes, not just in metal.” Those influences don’t coalesce into a single style so much as collide. Riffs arrive as fragments—what the band jokingly calls “riff bricks”—assembled in ways that feel intuitive rather than predetermined. Shaffer, who contributes much of the guitar material, describes the process with a shrug: “I have no idea where this shit comes from. It just comes out of nowhere.” What matters more is how they take those ideas and shape them together, translating half-formed vocalizations into intricate, shifting structures.

That sense of instability is central to the record. Songs rarely settle into a single mode; instead, they move with internal friction, slipping between time signatures, tonalities, and emotional registers. Even the band’s dual vocal approaches—harsh and melodic—resist easy resolution. Rather than representing distinct characters or perspectives, Plotkin treats them as extensions of the same voice, deployed instinctively in response to the music. “If it feels like it’s calling for screams, then I use that. If it feels like it’s calling for clean vocals, I’ll use those.” The result is less a dialogue than a tension—one that mirrors the album’s lyrical themes.

Living With the Aftermath

Those themes coalesce around trauma—not as a singular event, but as a condition that endures. “That’s the part that lasts,” Plotkin says. “That’s what you do for the rest of your life.” It’s a deceptively simple statement, yet it cuts to the core of Scarabaeus. While much of extreme metal fixates on the act itself, Lividus are concerned with its residue: how it fractures identity, repeats in cycles, and resists closure. “It’s so much more brutal dealing with that for the rest of your life than the traumatic event itself,” she adds.

That perspective isn’t purely personal. Plotkin points to a broader cultural backdrop—the pandemic, political upheaval, and a general sense of instability—that shapes the record’s emotional terrain. Trauma here is both individual and collective, saturating the present. It’s also something that cannot be neatly processed or resolved, lingering instead in cycles that mirror the music’s own shifting, recursive structures.

Built Without Boundaries

If Scarabaeus feels meticulously constructed, it’s because it is. The band’s collaborative dynamic enables a level of precision that might otherwise seem at odds with its more chaotic impulses. “We all gel together musically so well,” Plotkin notes. “Songs come together like that.” For Thompson, that ease stems from the breadth of the members’ backgrounds. “We’ve all played in so many different types of bands … It creates this environment where there really are no rules.” That lack of constraint isn’t an absence of discipline but an expansion of possibility—a willingness to move between styles without being bound by them.

The addition of Cather underscores that openness. Coming off a stretch of relentless touring, she approached Lividus with a clear priority: finding something truly collaborative. “I was already a fan of Lividus, but I wanted to make sure it was truly collaborative,” she says. Assured that the band operated as a shared creative space, she stepped into a role that demanded not only technical proficiency but also active engagement in that collective process. The result is a two-guitar interplay that feels dense and deliberate, with each part reinforcing the other without overcrowding the arrangement.

Precision and Release

Its production brings that density into sharp focus on Scarabaeus. Working with Keith Merrow enabled the band to preserve the intricacy of their arrangements without sacrificing impact. Every element—guitars, drums, and viola—remains distinct, contributing to a sound that feels expansive rather than cluttered. It’s a crucial choice for music that thrives on detail, where the interplay among parts is as important as the parts themselves.

For all its complexity, Scarabaeus isn’t a cold record. Beneath the precision lies something more immediate: a sense of engagement, even joy, in the act of creation. “It was just so fun to put the whole thing together,” Shaffer says, recalling the recording process. That enthusiasm doesn’t undercut the record’s thematic weight—it complicates it, suggesting that even within a framework of damage and instability, there’s still room for discovery.

No Resolution, Only Continuation

That tension—between control and chaos, between endurance and expression—is what gives Lividus their distinct voice. Scarabaeus doesn’t offer resolution, and it doesn’t pretend to. Instead, it maps the terrain of what comes after, where meaning is provisional and recovery is uncertain. In doing so, it captures something that feels less like an escape from the present than a confrontation with it—uncomfortable, unresolved, and all the more compelling for it.

Band photos by Casey O’Neal