Portland, OR death dealers Vitriol are locked and loaded to release new album Suffer & Become on January 26 via Century Media. To celebrate, Decibel has teamed up with Vitriol and Century Media for a very special giveaway: the paintings featured in the music video for “The Flowers of Sadism,” a single from Suffer & Become.
You can watch the video, which centers around a woman creating the paintings being given away, below, in addition to reading an excerpt from an upcoming Decibel Magazine feature on Vitriol (subscribe so you don’t miss it). Enter the contest here—it’s open to new entries until 11:59 PM on January 25. Winner will be contacted by Century Media, not Decibel.
(Magazine excerpt by Chris Dick)
“When anyone responds to a medium of art that really resonates with them,” opines Vitriol riff-slinger/vocalist Kyle Rasmussen, “it’s because it reflects back to them something about their personal experience, or their environment, that either they have a hard time articulating for themselves or they have a hard time finding someone to commiserate with. And for me, extreme metal specifically was it.”
It’s hard to imagine what Rasmussen and four-stringer/vocalist Adam Roethlisberger went through to come up with their debut album, To Bathe from the Throat of Cowardice (2019), and its belting follow-up Suffer & Become, but whatever it was, it was significant. The duo, now rounded out by newcomers drummer Matt Kilner (Gorgasm) and guitarist Daniel Martinez (ex-Atheist), battle with and are transformed by the experience they’re unfurling with Vitriol.
“Anyone who tries to make art is implanting an experience in another person’s mind,” Rasmussen says. “To have them feel what you feel, see what you see. As I get older, my personal philosophies develop and they become part of Vitriol. There’s a feedback loop between me and Vitriol. Writing [Suffer & Become], I appreciated that Vitriol became more than just a band. It was a user interface for self-development—whether it’s spiritual, artistic or intellectual.”
While To Bathe songs—specifically “The Parting of a Neck, “I Drown Nightly,” “Victim” and “Hive Lungs”—were nightmarish, chaos-hurled vortices, the massive sonic missives on Suffer & Become crash not with reckless death metal abandon, but slice, thrust and cut (German swordmaster Johannes Liechtenauer’s so-called “drei Wunder”) with menacing ambition.
Enter to win the contest here.
