Dirty and psychedelic in kind, Johannesburg’s Mad God have been picked up to release their next album through South Africa’s leading heavy purveyor, Mongrel Records. Their 2018 sophomore outing, Grotesque and Inexorable (review here), is still their latest release, but they’re reportedly working toward new stuff, and hey, you can’t rush a good rolling riff. The band at that point featured Evert Snyman (solo work, Ruff Majik, producer of many, etc.) on bass, and they’ve since brought on board Danny Helsing to fill that role, so one looks forward to hearing the inevitable change in their dynamic and how it might affect the sheer crunch of their riffing.

One expects they will remain quite, quite heavy, and that’s just fine, Grotesque and Inexorable feeling as much like a mission statement as a self-assessment.

From the PR wire:

MAD GOD – Mongrel Records

Mad God is a 3 piece doom metal band from Johannesburg, South Africa and take influences from bands such as Electric Wizard, Church of Misery, OM, Sleep, Sons of Otis, The Sword and Black Sabbath. Mad God combine traditional, epic, sludge and stoner doom and play a mix of crushingly slow riffs and psychedelic soundscapes layered with reverb drenched vocals and lyrics touching on horror, madness, drug abuse and interdimensional beings. Our music goes beyond the traditional metal tropes of blast beats and guttural vocals and experiments with slow and atmospheric textures that allows our essence to extend between worlds. Mad God’s show is more than just a live performance but an aural and physical experience that we share with our audience.

Mad God – Unholy Rituals – https://orcd.co/unholyrituals
Mad God – Tales of a Sightless City – https://orcd.co/talesofasightlesscity
Mad God – Grotesque and Inexorable – https://orcd.co/grotesqueandinexorable

Mad God are super excited to be working with Mongrel records going forward. We have been sitting on scraps of riffs as well as some almost finished tracks for a while now so this is the kick we needed to get on with it. We are extremely thankful for this opportunity to work with MR and can’t wait to deliver some new music in the not too distant future. – Tim Harbour, guitars/vocals.

I have been a huge fan of Mad God for a couple years now. There previous albums are on constant rotation in the office. We’ve been chatting for a long time about them joining Mongrel. Everything finally fell into place and we couldn’t be happier. – Warren Gibson, label manager

MAD GOD are:
Danny Helsing – Bass
Tim Harbour – Vocals and Guitar
Pat Stephansen – Drums

https://www.facebook.com/madgodza
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https://madgodza.bandcamp.com/
https://madgodband.com/
http://mongrelrecords.com
http://www.facebook.com/mongrelrecords
http://www.instagram.com/mongrel_records

Mad God, Grotesque and Inexorable (2018)

Semi-psych dirt sludgers Mad God are taking preorders now via Bandcamp for their sophomore full-length, Grotesque and Inexorable. The six-song/47-minute long-player follows the Johannesburg, South Africa, trio’s 2017 debut, Tales of a Sightless City, and boasts Lovecraftian themes and a horror-minded atmosphere worthy of the occasion. Amps tuned to 666, riffs a-murky and a plod in Pat Stephansen‘s drumming that finds ground beneath the floating, visibility-zero haze surrounding — it’s got all the makings of stoner ritualism, yet manages to balance its influences from earlier Electric Wizard, with a traditional doom sensibility, guitarist/principal songwriter Tim Harbour offsetting effects-drenched moans with cleaner, clearer vocals in the shifts between songs like “The DeZalze Horror” and the particularly memorable, Manson-themed “I Created God,” the lurch of which you can experience for yourself in the lyric video premiere below.

Whether it’s marching rhythm of that track, given low-end heft via the basswork of Evert Snyman, or the purposeful force-your-head-under-muddy-water deep-dive of opener “Haunting the Graves of the Unhallowed,” there’s a clarity of purpose and intent that underscores the slow-motion onslaught, and there’s an emergent sense of atmosphere especially as the album plays out subsequent to that opener that by the time they get around to “The Crawling Chaos,” fourth of the six inclusions, sees a progressing change in the shape of the record’s personality. I don’t know if they’re following a narrative arc from one song to the next, but the flow between tracks speaks to Grotesque and Inexorable as a linear work despite its obvious vinyl-readiness. The arrangement of the songs with three eight-plus-minute cuts on side A and three shorter (not by much, but still) pieces on side B speaks a platter-ist mindset as well, but the point is the album flows either way.

Though perhaps “churns” would be a better word for what it does, since Mad God seem mostly to be stirring a doomly cauldron with their material, sending slow undulations rippling outward as they make their repetitive motions with the aforementioned shifts along the way. The closing salvo of “No Prayers, No Fires” and “The Hunt Begins” reinforces the ethereal presence in Harbour‘s vocals and chugs to oblivion, leaving the bounce in the finale as a kind of revelry of the damned that not only echoes the movement of “I Created God” in the same position or rounding out side A, but pushes further along the same line, dragging the audience into a horror-infused, radioactive creep.

Grotesque and Inexorable arrives Nov. 2. Please enjoy “I Created God” below, followed by more info from the PR wire:

Mad God, “I Created God” lyric video premiere

Johannesburg’s purveyors of sludgy-stoner-doom Mad God are set to release their second album Grotesque and Inexorable on the 2nd November. As a little taste for things to come they’ve unveiled a lyric video for the track I Created God taken from the album.

“This song was written after watching a Charles Manson documentary following his death in 2017. This song does not condone the actions of the cult leader but rather delves into the psyche and motives of both him and his followers around the time of the murders that took place in 1969.” – Tim Harbour

Mad God is:
Tim Harbour – Vocals and Guitar
Pat Stephansen – Drums
Evert Snyman – Bass

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