I remember when Murderworks originally came out in 2002, and myself and my grind-hound friends loving it. Everyone thought Rotten Sound was sick. Good news for us, then: Time to Kill Records is reissuing the record on multiple formats next year.
I’ve been spinning recent records like Abuse to Suffer and Apocalypse a lot lately, and the music on those is kind of impenetrable: riffs are hard to discern and a lot of the tempos and drum beats are the same or similar. I think Rotten Sound has been trying to be as brutal as possible on more recent records, and that sometimes means a purposeful lack of dynamics. Or maybe the band thinks there’s lots of dynamics, at least to them, like in the details and not in the big picture.
Most bands in death metal and grindcore have brutality and extremity as their primary goals, at least early on in their careers, but Rotten Sound is a band that has succeeded in getting more extreme as it’s gone along. So it’s almost strange to listen to Murderworks again now, because compared to the later records, there’s a lot of song variation and guitar riffs one can pick out.
Back in 2002 when Murderworks originally came out, the band’s label at the time released a music video for the album’s first track, “Targets,” below.
Now, Time to Kill has put up an audio track to promote the reissue, for the song “Doom,” below.
Murderworks is coming back out on digipack CD, gatefold LP, cassette, and digital. It’s all up for preorder now and is coming out on Time to Kill on January 3, 2025. Grindcore fans and of course Rotten Sound diehards should watch for it.
