A decade ago, a death metal album about the AI takeover of Earth and an onslaught of machines harvesting humans as biofuel might have seemed typically lurid and far-fetched. But today, it sounds eminently plausible. London’s Mutagenic Host depicted this scenario on 2025’s The Diseased Machine, a nightmare dystopia which cleaves to the “hyperrealist” philosophy vocalist and lyricist Ash Moore espouses for the band. What was once hard sci-fi is now hard reality.

In January, Mutagenic Host put out two new singles (a double A-side in old language) as an epilogue to The Diseased Machine: “Grotesque Union” and “Chimeric Vestige”. They are what Moore calls “a lamentation for humankind”, with the last human left on Earth forced to dissolve away in a cage, a prisoner to the intelligence that has usurped them. It’s a crushing scenario depicted by crushing music built on three pillars: groove, aggression and good songwriting. Guitarist Jack Thompson summarises the mission of these “Mutants” as "making simplicity interesting”.

There was a time when science fiction was a niche concern for death metal, a subgenre born from eighties thrash and preoccupied with blood, guts, extreme behaviour, and man’s capacity to inflict pain. But sci-fi tropes are now right at the centre of the insurgent New Wave of British Death Metal, which has been bubbling away with increasing ferocity since the advent of the 2020s. In a subgenre often regarded as misanthropic, Moore underlines that Mutagenic Host are a humanist band.

“We're in this hyper era of death and destruction caused by machines and caused by algorithms or AI,” he says. “The singularity is very close. So we're coming to the merging of man and machine. Because this planet is dying, and we need, as humans, to (unfortunately) traverse flesh and blood; to be able to traverse the stars, because otherwise humanity is dead. So it's actually an existential question.”

Rather than write gory death metal for the sake of it, Moore explores his interest in the separation of mind and body in a genre often obsessed with the destruction of the latter.

One of the legacies of great science fiction novels and films is that they’ve given us a framework to understand a new world around us as it emerges. That framework tends towards catastrophe. When Fear Factory released Demanufacture in 1995 it was a response to James Cameron’s Terminator 2 four years earlier. Paranoia about the threat of sentient AI was embedded in that story’s notion of Skynet unleashing a nuclear holocaust. 

“We're living in science fiction,” says Thompson. “All the sci-fi people wrote about is actually happening. Unfortunately, we didn't get all the cool stuff they depicted. But we got all the fucked-up stuff.”

Mutagenic Host’s new singles have been released by Church Road Records, run by Sammy Urwin and Justine Jones, founding members of UK metal titans Employed to Serve. Urwin sees the British death metal scene’s rejuvenation as explicitly tied to diversifying its subject matter.

“The scene is thankfully far more inclusive these days,” he says. “It used to be an absolute dude fest and quite often violence towards women would be the centre point for a lot of bands’ lyrical content. Luckily that trend has died down, and we seem to be in an era where people have become fed up with that being one of the leading themes of the genre.”

When Urwin attended shows in the early 2000s, the British scene was dominated by bands like Gorerotted, Desecration and Amputation, and the Grindethic Records label. But the audience was ageing fast, remaining largely the same following the emergence of classic bands in the eighties and nineties. Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Napalm Death and Cancer formed the spear’s tip of UKDM. From their base in the Wirral outside Liverpool, Carcass pioneered grindcore, before effectively inventing melodic death metal now synonymous with Swedish strongholds like Gothenburg. For a while the British scene was cutting edge, but its sharpness dulled after it entered the 21st century.

Technology has been intrinsic to bringing fresh blood to the UK scene, as well as the essential work of the Dry Cough label, which Moore credits for being “the label that is the New Wave of British Death Metal.” Urwin says that it’s impossible to imagine today’s scene without the impact of the internet.

“For better, or as some may say for worse, social media has played a huge factor in pushing the popularity of death metal and its old-school roots,” he says. “Immediately the virality of Bolt Thrower and Mortician memes spring to mind. I feel like the aesthetic of these classic DM bands have garnered a lot of attention through the lens of social media, and have drawn people to explore and be influenced by the rich back catalog of death metal.”

In a galaxy far, far away, in Leeds, Northern England, Cryptic Shift are also expanding the dimensions of death metal. They describe their sound as “phenomenal technicological astrodeath” and have just released a stunningly ambitious second album called Overspace & Supertime on Metal Blade. Its storyline runs in parallel with the scenes depicted in their full-length debut, 2020’s Visitations from Enceladus. In the band’s mind, the two albums are interchangeable, with returning leitmotifs and lyrical themes. Over the last six years, they have revisited and refined musical ideas and generated new ones. The new album’s second track, “Stratocumulus Evergaol”, is a cool 29-minutes long.

“She's in a cockpit,” vocalist/guitarist Xander Bradley explains of the album’s lead character in that song. “She's like, blasting around asteroids, shooting her laser guns – ships exploding, just like the TIE Fighters, Star Wars stuff. And it's cool, awesome thrash metal. Loads of riff ideas could definitely get dropped over that [scene]. But then, equally, we might just have a riff that gets invented in the room, and I'm thinking, is that just an extension of the previous section, or does that evoke anything new in my mind for a new lyric?”

Bradley describes his lyrics as “little chunks of poetry”. With lines like “portcullis of my eyes pry open” it’s easy to see where he’s coming from. But this band works in mysterious ways, so if a word with the perfect meaning doesn’t look right, he will dispense of it in favour of a stranger word. The story can lead their music, and their music can lead the story.

Cryptic Shift’s commitment to their creative quirks is unassailable. Each instrumental solo section on Overspace & Supertime is given a strange name to describe these “sacred moments” of musicianship, such as “Mountainous Surmont of a Parabolic Photon-Track” and “Girl on Fire: Tresses Aflame”. 

They also integrate sections of highly technical jazz fusion into their songs.

“We've always been fans of jazz fusion, just as players,” says drummer Ryan Sheperson. “Because obviously that's where all the greatest players are. And it's always in our aspirations as players to get better and achieve those kind of levels.”

The clean guitars of “Stratocumulus Evergaol” are a nod to fusion guitar god Allan Holdsworth (just listen to Meshuggah’s guitar solos to hear his influence elsewhere). These clean sounds and ambient sections serve an important narrative purpose for Cryptic Shift on an album where songwriting and storytelling are symbiotic. They cite Birdland (particularly their 1980 Darkness of Light album), Tribal Tech, Al Di Meola and CAB as other integral influences from the jazz-fusion world.

It feels like an incongruous melding of genres but Cryptic Shift points to 1993 album Spheres by Switzerland’s Pestilence as an early example of a death metal band integrating fusion into its sound. There’s also Nocturnus, whose Mike Browning recorded theremin solos for Overspace & Supertime. Bradley remembers the look on Browning’s face as he used the strange electronic instrument, invented by Leon Theremin in the early twentieth century, to access “weird dimensions” and commune with “the Ancient Ones” recording his parts. It puts Cryptic Shift in a long line of sci-fi bands, alongside recent releases from Blood Incantation and Inoculation, as much as at the forefront of death metal. Blood Incantation’s 2024 album Absolute Elsewhere inhabited the kosmische mainframe of seventies progressive rock in a similar way to how Cryptic Shift took the jazz-fusion route.

“They're always particularly unique in their own influences,” Sheperson says of the sci-fi bands who have come before. “They always have some sort of edge to it.”

For a genre rooted in earthy, visceral themes, there’s been an eruption of cosmic forms in British death metal which could be construed as psychedelia. Another death metal band on the Church Road label agrees: Cambridge’s Celestial Sanctuary.

“We’re not strictly inspired by just death metal,” says vocalist/guitarist Tom Cronin. “There’s a lot of inspiration from bands such as Mastodon in our sound, as well as Pink Floyd, who are local heroes for us. We practise right near Syd Barrett’s old place and the artwork and video for [1994 Floyd album] Division Bell and [single] ‘High Hopes’ was all shot on the fields behind our HQ. I think, as well, having ‘celestial’ in our name has subconsciously driven us into otherworldly territory at times.”

The UK's progressive rock lineage wormed its way deep into Celestial Sanctuary’s 2023 album Insatiable Thirst for Torment. On a small island like the UK, death metal bands find themselves cheek by jowl with others from their genre and the country’s broader musical history. But there's also been a transatlantic surge in death metal of which the UK scene is a part.

“I think we just have to look at how quickly the genre and bands are evolving without compromising what they do,” says Cronin. “I would say this resurgence started in 2016, so for 10 years there’s been this breath of fresh air breathed into this rotten genre and it’s abundantly clear that it’s not slowing down – it’s diversifying and evolving. When you look at the records bands like Blood Incantation, Fulci, [recent tour mates] Sanguisugabogg and Gatecreeper are putting out… you couldn’t imagine all of that shit back then. It’s inspiring to be amongst it, to be honest.”

The other inescapable trend has been a new golden era of hardcore in a time when barriers between genres have dissolved. The bleedover might not be evident in Cryptic Shift's sound, but Mutagenic Host worship crossover act Xibalba and profess admiration for the Maggot Stomp label. The hardcore/death metal crossover was once dismissed as “Entombed-core”, but not anymore. The Mutants mention death metal stalwarts Dying Fetus having played both LDB and FYA fests. Mutagenic Host has multiple members from the hardcore scene. Even the members who aren't have an uncanny ability to channel its brute force and rage.

“Sometimes, I think you just jump in the vehicle, and the vehicle takes you somewhere,” says Moore.

“I also think the huge rise in hardcore’s popularity has played its part too, as there’s definitely been a lot of crossover between the two scenes over the last decade,” agrees Urwin. “The first place I started to see the renewed interest in old school death metal was the hardcore scene. People started rocking Obituary tees and I recall quite a lot of bands covering [Obituary song] ‘Redneck Stomp’. You had emerging US bands like Nails, Trap Them and Black Breath being heavily influenced by the HM-2 sound of the OG swedish scene, and you had other bands like Xibalba starting to tip their hat to the sounds of Bolt Thrower and Morbid Angel. Death metal has always been extremely hardcore-coded in certain bands' DNA. Take Suffocation and Internal Bleeding, whose sound was directly influenced by the New York hardcore scene. Those crossovers have remained and are prevalent in a lot of today's new batch of bands.”

But what has made the British scene particularly ripe in recent years? One factor is size. It’s a small land mass, everyone knows each other, and also understands how their band fits in and what they are bringing to the table. There’s a stark contrast to the vast swathes of distance between bands in the US and Europe.

“I think in America, they're in the middle,” says Moore. “There's a lot of the same stuff. I don't want to piss people off and I'm not being a cunt. I love American death metal. I will always love American death metal more than European death metal. (Don't love it more than British death metal, but I love it more than European death metal.) Because we're a smaller country, the quality isn't as widely spread. So I think it's quite specifically put into certain bands around the country. Look at Vacuous for example, who are doing something a little bit more interesting or with a little more of an original skew.”

“I think in most other metal/core genres the UK/Europe just tries to copy what the US does without really adding anything to the movement – and that makes me cringe to be honest,” says Cronin. “But with death metal and extreme metal we have more of a stake in it. So the handful of bands from here that are worth shit are putting more of a stamp on the genre. There’s an element of dirtiness and a certain attitude that’s unique to the stuff from our island.” 

The second factor is heritage, and these musicians’ almost fanatical understanding of metal's origins and cultural importance in the UK. Moore is from Birmingham and speaks of the city as one of a number of “epicenters of strength, brotherhood, and of making great music.” Each part of the UK has a fierce pride. Moore highlights the Scottish scene within the British one, particularly Glasgow’s Coffin Mulch, but also Suffering Rites and the young, “disgustingly putrid” Jaundice.

“I think it also comes down to this lineage of insanely good death metal: Carcass, Bolt Thrower, you name it, from the UK,” he concludes.

The third factor is timing, or rather the cycle of trends. Call it the circle of life... and death metal. When they were younger, Cryptic Shift saw a run of good British thrash be supplanted by a rising tide of death metal bands. The British death metal bands that emerged in the 2010s are now moving onto their second or third albums and perfecting their sound. Be warned.

“With us coming into the music scene for the first time at the tail end of the late-2000s thrash-metal thing and starting our own bands, and putting out demos in the early 2010s, we were at the tail end of that,” he explains. “The time wasn't right for the UK to really blast off at that point. So over the last 10 years, developing our sound and as musicians, it feels like now's the time. And it makes sense, because all these other bands must feel the same. It's time.”