Review by Vinny for Chemicide - Violence Prevails (2025)

With half an hour or so to kill on a Sunday morning, a thrash record was a perfect fit. A Costa Rican thrash metal in fact, and a none too shabby effort to boot. Having listened to probably a handful of thrash metal at best this year so far, Chemicide with their brazen artwork and equally bold thrash metal made for a welcome breeze through my lugholes this morning. With Costa Rica not being the hotbed of thrash metal of say Chile, it was interesting to hear some quality beyond the borders and shores of that ever increasingly impressive thrash metal nation.

Full of commentary and judgement on social injustice and violence, the band’s fifth full length offering has some real bruising rhythms and cutting edges to those riffs. With vocals straight out of the Mille Petrozza playbook, there’s a solid nod back to the foundations of the sub-genre on display. Placed alongside the racing riffs in the style of Slayer, with equally chaotic solos a la King and Hanneman at the peak of their powers also, Violence Prevails soon makes a name for itself. The drums and rhythm combination often reminds me of Sepultura in their Arise/Chaos A.D. days (that ringing guitar melody on ‘Parasite’ helps also).

The production job permits fullness to the sound across the instrumentation, with only the bass struggling for a bit of space. It is still audible though, just battling away in the background. Listen intently enough and you can hear it plonking away beneath the barrage of riffs that lead the attack for the most part. As you would hope it to be, the title track is a fucking blast end-to-end. This is what a title track should always do; totally underpin the album ethos in one succinct and well-placed moment on the record. With the energy levels already high going into the mid-point of the record, placing a banger in the center is key to advertising the longevity, or peak of the record.

Thankfully, what follows on from the title track represents no dip in energy or quality. If anything, tracks such as the franticly paced ‘Chokehold’ only up the ante on the record. This is not to say that Chemicide just focuses on face-melting intensity to get their message across. I mean, yes, it is an integral part of proceedings, this cannot be denied. However, the band controls the pace and tempos well, without sacrificing the intensity for the most part. The only real cooling-off section is during ‘Supremacy’ with its bass and picked strings opening, which soon give way to chopping riffs as the track builds superbly.

Closing the record with two (three if you have the corresponding version of the album) covers is a move that leaves me lukewarm in comparison to the rest of the record. I have never heard of Los Crudos and so cannot possibly know what justice Chemicide does to the track they cover. Metallica’s ’72 Seasons’ is a track I am vaguely familiar with after I sat through the abomination of the record that the track comes from, and, well…glitter on a turd is a phrase that springs to mind. I won’t let this unfortunate ending ruin what is otherwise a great discovery though, as a standalone record, with their own material, Chemicide are impressive.