DEGENERATED is a Death Metal band from Italy that has been making music since the year 2000, when they released their debut demo titled “Nuclear Test: Failed”. A demo that showed a band with a dark, aggressive sound with Italian tinges. Then, in 2024, they released their debut album titled the same way as the demo, “Nuclear Test: Failed”. Here, naturally, they already showed a more mature face and a much more elaborate sound, but one that preserves the essence of the band in their demo. Their identity. Their style. Two years later, this 2026, they are back with this new album titled “Echoes Of Infection”. Again an album that gathers the main conceptual elements of the band, destruction, ruins, survival of the fittest, all this mixed with somber and grotesque literary references, while, on the other hand, they perfect the sound, the style, the darkness and the atmosphere proper to what they initially projected as a band since 2000, although I perceived a certain tendency to want to sound a bit more modern. That being said, the songs are complex, full of extremely dark intros and outros and of a desolate nature that jumps (from one moment to another) into aggressiveness. That is what happens (for example) between ‘Echoes Of Infection’ and ‘Humanity And Its Last Breath’, exactly that. An abrupt change from a dense, slow and atmospheric outro to a song with a lot of what they call brutal Death Metal. Then ‘Only The Strongest Prevails’ or ‘Desertification’ point a bit more towards the virtuosity of their guitarists with solo passages close to virtuosity. I want to highlight ‘As We Fall’ and ‘Extermination’, the last two songs of the album. They turned out to be the ones that best suit my tastes. They are less complex in their musical structure, but much more in the vein of the more “traditional” Metal that someone like me would prefer. Furthermore, I like that they sound even darker and that they fit into a more classic line where branches of more atmospheric Metal are fused, with much less virtuosity. For me, in this type of styles, less is more. But well, DEGENERATED plays how they want, makes the music they want, and writes about what they want. Here is more information: www.facebook.com/greatdanerecords