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Thrashback Thursday: Suffocation - "Bind Torture Kill"

New York has a reputation worldwide for being hard as nails and producing tough guys, which is something that has been represented in their music throughout the decades. Hip hop is a well known contribution New York has made to music, but their punk, hardcore and metal legacy is certainly the stuff of legends as well, having produced such bands as The Ramones, Agnostic Front and Anthrax to name but a few. Another band who personified what their home was all about, particular in the vocalist's accent, was Long Island's own, Suffocation, probably one of New York's best known death metal bands along with Cannibal Corpse. Their music was unforgiving in its brutality and punished the ears of audiences throughout the nineties until the band split in 1998.

Luckily for fans of the group and the genre, Suffocation reunited in 2003 and a year later released the excellent album, "Souls to Deny." The record helped put them back on the metal map after five years away and in 2006, they solidified that the comeback was for real by releasing a self-titled album. Like their previous efforts, the album was a display of sonic violence and extremes, earning good reviews in nearly every publication and delighting fans with a re-recording of the old track, "Prelude to Repulsion" from their album, "Breeding the Spawn." It also produced two music videos, one for "Abomination Reborn" and one for today's featured song, "Bind Torture Kill."

The song was inspired by the serial killer, Dennis Rader, also known as the "BTK strangler" after his infamous signature. This horrifying subject is captured perfectly in the song, which has a pummeling intro before getting into the grizzly business. Like the majority of Suffocation's catalogue, it's a relentless bulldozer of a song, encapsulating the claustrophobic fear of a victim of violence and aggression that comes with a mindset hellbent on causing destruction. It was a highlight on a solid album and was popular enough that even the History Channel, who then actually made programmes about history, took notice and featured the song in an advertisement for their series on the dark ages. It's an excellent slab of brutal death metal that put any worries about Suffocation not living up to their own blood soaked legacy to rest.