Defiled have never been easy to classify, and that’s precisely the point. Active since 1992 — death metal’s formative era — the Tokyo quartet are neither nostalgists nor revisionists. They do not trade in genre signifiers as aesthetic cosplay. Over nine full-lengths, founding guitarist Yusuke Sumita and his band of warriors have carved out something genuinely singular: a strain of death metal that is technically rigorous without being sterile, rooted in the underground without being beholden to it. Altered State is their latest argument that this approach still has room to surprise — though it’s a more complicated argument than the band’s own framing suggests.
The recent run has been remarkable. Infinite Regress (2020), The Highest Level (2023), and Horror Beyond Horror (2024) formed a three-album hot streak that drew serious attention — Decibel handed that last record an 8/10 and called the band’s output “peak ability, creativity and volatility.” Altered State arrives on the heels of that momentum, and Sumita has cited George Orwell’s 1984 as the lyrical framework. That’s an accurate but incomplete description. “Dazed in Blindness” opens the record with an inventory of Orwellian control mechanisms — doublespeak, propaganda, “stealth manipulation” — and “Zombified” delivers some of the album’s most visceral imagery in explicitly 1984 terms: brainwashed masses in invisible cages, a ragtag mob on the march, rulers who “don’t see or care.” “Necro-Force” distills the Party’s logic to its most brutal reduction: comply and die / death after compliance. These tracks understand Orwell not as a reference point but as a usable grammar for rage.
But “Obsession” operates in an entirely different register. Do what Thou wilt — Aleister Crowley’s central tenet, lifted verbatim — anchors a track about occultists gathering for rites, thelemic force, and psychic flame. “Metamorphosis of Evil” draws on morality play tradition, cataloguing the antagonist, the evil seducer, and the satirical moralist as stock figures running through allegorical metamorphoses. Neither track has anything to do with Orwell. The album’s conceptual layer is, in fact, bifurcated: one half dystopian political horror, one half occult metaphysics. Whether that duality is intentional synthesis or simply two strands that never fully merge is a question Altered State raises without answering.
The production, handled in-house — Sumita producing, Shinichiro Hamada and Keisuke Hamada engineering at Studio Zot in Tokyo, with mixing and mastering by Kenji Kikuchi at Studio Nest in Chiba — is deliberately muted, favoring the midrange and low end over any polished sheen. It’s a choice that gives the record an organic weight, pressing the music through dense earth rather than broadcasting it through clean air. On the album’s strongest tracks, that density feels earned. On its weaker ones, it obscures rather than intensifies.
Opener “Dazed in Blindness” establishes the template: fast-moving riffs, Shinichiro Hamada’s ferocious vocal delivery, Keisuke Hamada’s drumming hitting every metric shift with the precision of someone three decades deep in this craft. “Obsession” is where the album gets genuinely strange — its riff shapeshifts and warps around itself without resolving, a musical analog to the occult practice it’s describing. “Portal,” the lead single, earns that designation: a relatively traditional death metal opening gives way to a series of tempo shifts that feel like the ground dropping out, the band’s technical control most visible precisely because the structure seems on the verge of collapse.
The closing trio — “Prophecies,” “Demolition,” and “Apocalyptic End” — functions as a unified final statement. “Prophecies” is the album’s darkest and most foreboding stretch, its central declaration — prophecies left out a key piece of the puzzle — landing with the weight of something irreversible. “Demolition” snaps back with blunt-force riffing and a lyrical arc of total surrender: sovereignty deprived / dignity dissolved. “Apocalyptic End” closes things on a note of conspiratorial dread — dark forces, pyramidal power, the calcification of the pineal gland — with the dexterous meter-shifting the band has made a signature. As an endgame, it works.
What doesn’t fully work is the album’s midsection. At fourteen tracks, Altered State runs longer than it needs to. The muted production that gives “Obsession” its disorienting weight becomes a liability across tracks like “Zombified” and “Metamorphosis of Evil,” where individual identities erode into textural sameness. Sumita has acknowledged the record may not reveal itself immediately, and that’s fair — but there’s a meaningful distinction between “intentionally challenging” and “insufficiently differentiated,” and Altered State occasionally strays into the latter.
Altered State is not Defiled‘s most fully realized statement — the bloated runtime and blurred midsection see to that. But when this band is operating at their most disorienting and precise, as on “Obsession,” “Portal,” and the closing sequence, they remain unlike anything else working in this space. Nine albums deep, that’s no small claim.
Defiled still sound like a band with something to prove. In 2026, that alone sets them apart.
“Altered State” Track-listing:
- Dazed in Blindness
- Altered State
- Obsession
- Portal
- Necro-Force
- The Degradation
- Genocidal State
- Metamorphosis of Evil
- The Ultra Death
- Zombified
- Lunatics
- Prophecies
- Demolition
- Apocalyptic End
Defiled Lineup:
- Shinichiro Hamada – Vocals, Guitar
- Yusuke Sumita – Guitar
- Takachika Nakajima – Bass
- Keisuke Hamada – Drums
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