GREH sounds exactly how their name suggests—not quite a fully formed name, but a mouthful of growl. Distorted and blackened with a down-tuned grimness that’s heavy like a grave. Hailing from Karlsruhe, Germany, GREH started as one-man project and released their debut EP, Age of Resentment, in 2022. A year later, the project grew a few appendages and evolved into a full-fledged trio, releasing their second EP, Reversion of the Repressed. Now, three years on from its inception, GREH has returned to unleash its third record via Fretzner Death Records on January 15, 2025, a full-length maximum effort album called Dysphoric Devotion.

Dysphoric Devotion clocks in at just over the 29-minute mark with eight tracks of relentless extreme metal. As the album title suggests, this album worships at the altar of complete decay and distortion. Like most Death Metal it relishes in guttural, demonic vocals; downtuned as fuck riffage; and misanthropic lyrical tendencies. On the innovation front, not a lot of originality going on here, but I don’t think they’re shooting for Avant-garde or Experimental. This is brutal metal with zero dilution.

Standout tracks include the opening track, “Chained Thoughts,” which is simply savage. The perfect salvo to start the assault. Title-track, “Dysphoric Devotion,” is another crusher. With these two tracks back-to-back, your eardrums will be thoroughly abused before the seven-minute mark. Third on my list is “Thy Breath Not Mine” for its rampage through Death, Doom, and then Black. Fourth would be “Enter My Oblivion.” It sounds a bit anthem-ish and is a little hooky and it even has a synth outro . . . and it is either despite these elements or because of these elements that it is such a strong track. Go figure.

Altogether, Dysphoric Devotion is a solid Blackened Death artifact. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. This is pure, unmitigated extreme metal with no flourishes or facades. Only serious metal fans need apply.