Vancouver death metal band The Blade Itself released their debut EP, “Black With Blood,” today. It takes the band from traditional 90s death metal obsession to what sounds right to them.
“The overarching goal has always been to capture the tone of the Boss HM2, and apply it to a death/thrash songwriting approach,” vocalist Keith Durocher tells Musiknights.
The musicians recorded the bed tracks at their jam space, while overdubs, mixing and mastering took place at Vancouver’s 708 Sound Studio. The whole process took them about seven months.
Black With Blood is focused on dark events in human history as a general thing, touching on a vast array of topics at once. It also features a Bolt Thrower cover, “Cenotaph”.
“We didn’t want to be war metal, we didn’t want to be murder metal, we didn’t want to be anti-religion in specific, but we did kinda want to be all of those things. So we have tracks about war, about murder, and about religious genocide,” Keith adds.
With Durocher, one of the band’s founding members, leaving the band due to relocating to another city, The Blade Itself are auditioning new vocalists, and once they find one, the plan is to get out and do as many shows as possible. Also, they are already working on their future release.
The Blade Itself are a Vancouver-based death metal band founded by Keith Durocher and Gaelen Huestis. In the beginning, it was a continuation of their previous band Codex:Factoria with the same lineup, but with different guitars. They played classic death and thrash metal with a heavy emphasis on the original wave of Swedish chainsaw-tone bands like Dismember and Entombed. Later, the band underwent many lineup changes with Alexis Belessiotis, Wes Swales and Matthew Riley joining around 2025.
The Blade Itself online:
https://www.instagram.com/thebladeitselfofficial
Cover photo — Bandcamp