Degenerate: Rituals of Rage – CD review
9th June 2025I put it on at 2:43 a.m., which is never a good sign. Volume is way too high. There was blood on the sleeve of my hoodie. I still don’t know whose, and the neighbour’s dog had been barking for an hour straight. I hit play anyway.
Rituals of Rage doesn’t ease you in. It strangles you mid-yawn. The opener hit so hard I coughed up something thick and warm and just kind of… swallowed it again. Ten tracks. Ten different ways to take a swing at God with a broken bottle and still lose.
This isn’t thrash metal the way I grew up with it. It’s thrash, but it’s been chain-smoked and starved for weeks in a collapsing shed somewhere outside Utrecht. There’s melody, but it limps. There’s groove, but it sounds like someone dragging a body over gravel. I kept thinking of that noise a clothesline makes when it creaks under the weight it shouldn’t carry.
Rens Hilgers doesn’t really sing on this. He sounds like he’s reading a suicide note someone else wrote in your handwriting. I think I blacked out halfway through “Ashen Loyalty.” I awoke four minutes later, standing in the kitchen holding a spoon for no reason. No idea how I got there. The track was still playing. I let it.
Mendel bij de Leij produced it. Ex-Aborted. Which makes sense. Everything here sounds sterilized and infected at the same time. Like if a surgical scalpel could scream. The guitars are sharp, sure, but there’s this undercurrent of sorrow like they miss the days when they only had to kill animals. The drums are relentless. I don’t even remember hearing fills—just impact, repetition, inevitability.
Sometimes it gets too tight. Too perfect. Like “Veins of Rust”, you can hear every note land exactly where it should, which makes it feel like the floor’s about to give way anyway. The whole record is like that. It’s not chaos. It’s ritualized. Formal. Like a public execution with a crowd that wants to be next.
I don’t even know if I like it. I mean, I do. But I also kind of want to throw it into a ditch and walk away forever. It’s that kind of record. The one you show to friends just to see who flinches.
Degenerate’s been at it since 2016. Played with Distillator, Disavowed, Acid Drinkers—hell of a résumé. But Rituals of Rage isn’t a career move. It’s an exorcism. You don’t write these songs because you want to. You write them because they won’t shut up otherwise. I respect that. I’m terrified by it. Same thing, really.
Anyway, I haven’t slept. The dog stopped barking. My ears are still ringing, and my hands won’t stop shaking. Maybe I should probably eat something.
Score 7/10
Track List
1 Servitor
2 Xenon Equilibrium
3 The Cult
4 Illuminate
5 Sentences of Death
6 Claymore
7 Faceless Violence
8 The Blacksmith
9 Rituals Of Rage
10 The Desert
Label: Self Release
Release: May 23, 2025
