I Never Thought it would Happen but Hellhouse Worship Exists

I love Hellhouse. If you don't know them, which I doubt you would, it's a one man band that Gordon Ancis, who was the guitarist in one of the best thrashcore bands of the '80s, NYC Mayhem, formed after leaving the band. It was literally just him, his guitar and a drum machine (I don't even think there was any bass), that released a single demo tape “Burn for Peace” in 1986. The sound was probably the most primitive and raw (both in composition and sound quality) death metal you can imagine, even more-so than the demos that Death were recorded at the time. There was undoubtedly an influence from hardcore, but this was by no means deathcore, not anywhere near it. The demo featured six songs and an outro in a runtime of just less than six minutes, all with the most stereotypical, '80s shock-wank death metal song titles you can imagine, such as “Crucified”, “Meat Cleaver” and “Kill your Mother”.

Now, imagine my surprise when, Vile Spirit guitarist, Lula Hoffmann posts on her Instagram story that she's listening to some band called “Berserk” and the album's artwork looks like a fusion of the “Burn for Peace” art and some '90s war metal album cover, leading to me looking up the band and discovering that their 2017 EP, titled “...Towards Emptiness”, sounds just like Hellhouse. Because I have never met anybody else who's heard of them and yet now there's some Nottingham-based band that sounds just like their demo, but with slightly clearer production.

But, just like Hellhouse, so little info on this band is available online, they're clearly from Nottingham, because it says so on their Bandcamp page, but other than everything I've already said, all I can find is their 2016 demo was uploaded on Youtube and one picture of them performing live posted on When Death Won't Solve your Problem, where they call them a hardcore band. There's so little about them that I don't even know if they were actually influenced by Hellhouse or if their similarity in sound is purely coincidental, but if you like super raw death metal or hardcore punk then you should definitely listen to this EP, it's phenomenal.