REVIEW: Drowned Under Concrete – 1444 [2025]

Artist: Drowned Under Concrete
Album: 1444

Slam—an abbreviation of slamming brutal death metal—fostered a righteous reputation for itself in the heavy music community as being among the heaviest, most dense and perverted offspring of death metal and its compatriots. Then, somewhere along the way, we kind of…lost the plot in favor of infusing slam with things to make it more accessible. This gave us a lot of great bands that took a backbone of slam and more overtly infused elements of hip-hop, deathcore and more—all in the name of ingenuity. It also gave us a host of slam bands hellbent on flipping a meme or corny thematic mimic into 30 seconds of fame via TikTok and the like (not to be named, for fear of giving them undue attention). Now, we’re in 2025, where for every one outstanding addition to the genre, we get at least one addition that seems like a bastardization of a bastardization. But for all the up-and-comers, none seem to hit the same way that Drowned Under Concrete do. Just as grotesque and bleak as their name might imply, Drowned Under Concrete is the latest addition to Hunter Young’s legacy, built by both him and Dave Mustrange with the vision of making something undoubtedly real—but also really heavy. A brief, blistering and lurid tour of pure sonic insanity designed to be abrasive for abrasiveness’ sake.

1444 is one part gargantuan riff, one part immolating slam and thoroughly grotesque. Mach-speed percussion clashes in unholy fashion against some of the most gut-plummeting and abominable guitar the listener has likely ever heard—and for twenty minutes, Drowned Under Concrete positively refuse to relent, subjecting the listener to a sonic onslaught birthed from the two. Each song seems to find its own way of embodying the core tenements of slamming brutal death metal in its own unique and blistering way: lead single “Sublingual Cyanide” captures visceral, raw, bouncy brutality while “Hydrosomaxan” is an unstoppable riff-driven juggernaut. It isn’t hyperbolic to state that there is no moment throughout the entirety of Drowned Under Concrete’s 20-minute debut wherein Young and Mustrange give the listener even a hint of a break. “Origami Blood Eagle” dogpiles breakdown after slam after breakdown after slam atop the listener while “Sublingual Cyanide” offers a slightly groovier approach to premeditated sonic onslaught. The gist is that Drowned Under Concrete’s debut offering is tangible and thorough in its approach to rending the listener flesh from bone in a fashion that is as dense and uncompromising as one would expect from musicians of Young and Mustrange’s caliber.

Remember those rasping guttural bellows and brees scattered across PSYCHO-FRAME’s discography? Well, I mean, you’re getting a whole release of them—and that’s most of what you need to know about the vocal approach to 1444. Between Young sticking his own voice box in a meat grinder and the pulpy, macerated-and-still-bleeding approach to Drowned Under Concrete’s production, the listener is bombarded by more than just an insane instrumental dynamic. Gutturals, burpy bellows, shrill screams and more await the listener throughout songs like “Involuntary Vehicular Masonry” and “Unalive Leak,” wreaking havoc in tandem with strategically-placed samples to evoke just a touch of rose-tinted nostalgia to counteract the gore-soaked…well, everything else. With the vocal element and production brought into focus, the beauty that is 1444 can become more fully-realized; it serves as a record that seems so hellbent on dropping the listener’s IQ on a logarithmic scale while itself being meticulously and masterfully crafted. Drowned Under Concrete—a harbinger of senseless, thoughtless violence—create a record that is, indeed, very carefully thought out, planned and executed.

In many ways, this review is obsolete: Yes, Drowned Under Concrete is the latest project from Hunter Young et al. Yes, it is exactly as unrelenting and over-the-top as both the name and reputation would make you believe. Yes, the Wax Vessel stream-of-consciousness summary paints more-or-less the perfect picture of 1444 and its modus operandi. But if you needed to hear it from a different source—or even just read it another time—Drowned Under Concrete are the soul of slamming death metal brought into fresh, modern flesh. Real drums, real guitar and real…ly insane vocals give rise to the contemporary continuation of slam’s archetypal titans. Violence, putridity and unabashed sonic perversion for the sake of it make 1444 one of the most wholly organic and un-missable releases in extreme music for the year thus far.

9/10
For Fans Of: Devourment, Corpse Pile, Suffocation, Guttural Slug, Abominable Putridity
By: Connor Welsh