Death metal often seems to belong to a bygone time, whether that’s the white-sneakered ’80s that birthed the genre or much, much further back. Simple power chord progressions get called “caveman riffs” when they’re tuned down a step and run through an HM-2 pedal, and there was once a whole-ass subgenre called “caverncore.” London’s Vacuous certainly have more than a passing familiarity with death metal’s most primordial aspects. They’re also perhaps the first death metal band to growl the word “internet.”

“They won’t let me live that down,” vocalist and lyricist Jo Chen laughs. “I think it’s funny.”

The lyric in question comes from “In His Blood,” the title track of the band’s devastating sophomore album and Relapse Records debut. It references Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film Pulse, the Y2K-era moody horror flick centered on spirits who invade the world of humans through their dial-up connections: “Ghosts on the internet/ Watch your life/ Watch your death,” Chen roars over a bed of frantic, dissonant guitars and pounding drums. He’s also singing about the familiar 21st century experience of witnessing extreme violence on a phone screen.

“I saw an online thread about this man who killed someone and took a picture standing in that person’s viscera and blood, and then he posted that onto Twitter, and then that got him killed,” Chen says. “There was something about it that was super arresting, because it was so casual.”

“When we were growing up, you’d have to go out of your way to find that stuff, but it can be consumed in a more casual way these days, and I think that can be quite jarring,” adds guitarist Michael Brodsky. “The fact that you can just put your phone down and go about your daily life having just looked at something horrific through a tiny little screen in your hands, that is just an absurd thing when you think about it.”

Vacuous formed at the beginning of 2020, two months before nearly all human experiences migrated to our tiny little screens. A more straightforward crossover band featuring Brodsky and Chen failed to get off the runway after their mutual friend and would-be bandmate ghosted the project. The two quickly realized they had more in common musically with each other than they did with him. They teamed up with bassist Damiano S., and the first iteration of Vacuous was born.

“We just ended up nerding out over extreme metal, rather than the crossover hardcore stuff,” Brodsky says. “We didn’t really have a set goal of, ‘Oh, we want to be a death metal band.’ We all had different backgrounds. But we were like, ‘Let’s just throw ideas around.’ And that first demo is just us doing that, basically, for our own benefit more than anything else.”

The band didn’t manage to play any shows prior to the pandemic shutdown, but Brodsky says that was a blessing in disguise. Chen handled both drums and vocals on the 2020 demo and the Katabasis EP, and Brodsky was still the band’s lone guitarist. It didn’t take long for the material the band was writing to outstrip their capabilities as a trio. Their first full-length, 2022’s Dreams Of Dysphoria, was the first Vacuous release to be conceived and recorded as a five-piece.

“Knowing that we’d be able to pull it off was the main thing,” Brodsky explains. “I suck at music, so it took me ages to realize what a harmony was, and I was like, ‘Oh, harmony is cool. Morbid Angel does that. I want to do this in all of our songs.’ But it turns out you need a second guitar player for that. So it was knowing that we could give ourselves that room to be a bit more expansive. I think because we’d been in that situation where we were remote, we were really tentative. Like, ‘Can we do this?’ But then, once the five-piece came together, it was like, ‘Oh, this is what we sound like.'”

If Dreams Of Dysphoria was, as Brodsky suggests, “this expansive, freeform, meandering thing,” then In His Blood is meant as a more direct assault. That’s initially evident in the change in aesthetic. Where the cover Dreams Of Dysphoria depicted some drippy, eldritch horror alongside an unreadable band logo, In His Blood is an urban nightmare in red, a lurid scene of concrete, graffiti, and implied violence, stamped with bold white lettering. The complete artwork makes the violence explicit, showing a body lying face down in a pool of blood.

“We broke into this cemetery outbuilding with our photographer, and I poured lots of soy sauce on this man,” Chen says, indicating a beaming Brodsky. “I covered him in cling film and tape, and poured soy sauce on him, which I stole from work, because at the time I worked in a kitchen. I was cycling back and forth from that cemetery to my job.”

“There’s something actually kind of oddly soothing about laying on a dusty floor, completely covered in soy sauce,” Brodsky says. “You’d think you’d be really uncomfortable, but after a while, you just kind of surrender to the experience. I was just like, ‘I am the corpse on the album cover now.'”

In His Blood‘s stark, modern artwork dovetails with the album’s themes. The horrors that Chen sings about here aren’t the cartoonish schlock of death metal’s foundational bands. When he does subtly nod to horror movies, they tend to be ones that are genuinely tough sits — the distressingly intimate Austrian serial killer movie Angst, or New French Extremity films like Inside and Martyrs. Chen says he loves “digital harshness,” and through its use of samples and bone-dry recording techniques, In His Blood reflects that love back.

More frequently, Chen invokes our own harsh reality. “Contraband” is about the 39 Vietnamese migrants who suffocated in a truck on their journey to the UK in 2019. (“Bound through hypoxia/ Exhausted all options/ Contraband, human rats,” he howls, the anguish evident in his voice.) Chen, whose family is Malaysian, says the song isn’t meant as an overt political statement, but it is meant to highlight how cheap life in the Global South can appear to comfortable onlookers in the West. We read about these tragedies on our phones, and we move on. Chen wants us to take a closer look.

“I remember just seeing the images of the collapsed people, and they’re people who look like me, essentially,” he says. “And just knowing the intimate details of how they died, and why they died, it stuck with me.”

Fittingly, In His Blood has more overt moments of musical aggression than Dreams Of Dysphoria did. The title track, “Stress Positions,” and “Flesh Parade” were written first, and Brodsky says their antagonistic, in-your-face directness came through in the writing as a kind of corrective to the contemplative tone of Dreams. “What we do tends to be in reaction to what we’ve done before,” he says.

It isn’t quite that simple, though. Repeat listens reveal a weirder undercurrent in In His Blood that cuts against its surface brutality. “As things got further into the writing process, we started seeing if we could pull from other things that we like, like goth music, post-punk,” Brodsky says. “Some of it was a bit of a dare, to see if we could get away with it.”

They get away with plenty, including a clean guitar passage inspired by Brodsky and Chen’s realization that the Cure’s “One Hundred Years” sounds like early Deathspell Omega. Other moments let noise and feedback hiss over the top of sparse drums and bass in an approximation of Throbbing Gristle-style industrial music. The part that leaps out of the speakers at me every time I listen to the album is the soaring, melodic guitar lead at the end of “Public Humiliation.”

“I’m a big fan of Paradise Lost, and Gregor Mackintosh is one of my favorite guitar players,” Brodsky explains. “He plays a lot of leads, but I wouldn’t say he plays guitar solos, because none of it is superfluous. He’s not trying to demonstrate to you how good a guitar player he is, and for me, there’s no space for that in this band. And the song itself has a lot of callbacks to funeral doom stuff like Thergothon, Evoken, and that kind of thing. So that was kind of the mindset I was in with that one.”

By eliding obsequious devotion to any one death metal band or subgenre, Vacuous remain open to what feels like an endless sea of possibilities. Their process is quick – they’ve made a demo, and EP, and two albums in five years, with a third LP currently in the works – but that allows them to stay receptive to inspiration.

“We’re conscious that we don’t want to finesse it and make it perfect,” Brodsky says. “We want to move at a pace where each thing is a snapshot of where you are at that time, and if you linger on something and try to perfect it, then you kind of lose that aspect. We’re constantly discovering new stuff, and sharing new music between us, and we want that to be reflected in the music we write as well.”

In His Blood is out 2/28 via Relapse Records.