There is brutal death metal that wants to impress you with its technical ability, and then there is brutal death metal that sounds like somebody locked the studio door, smashed the emergency exit sign, and decided nobody was leaving until the fucking room smelled bad. FAM belongs firmly in the second camp. Pleasure of Torture, the fourth full-length from the Polish death/grind veterans, is twenty-nine minutes of blunt-force trauma without much interest in showing off or pretending brutality needs sophistication to justify itself.

I Am the Monster | YouTube Music

Recorded at PanzerStudio in Myszków with a new lineup, this thing sounds enormous, filthy, and pissed off. FAM have been grinding away since 2005, and two decades apparently haven't mellowed them. They've just gotten better at locating the soft parts of your skull.

"Dismembered Identity" wastes absolutely no time establishing the rules. The guitars have that wonderful concrete-block density, Darek Młody's drums alternate between groove and outright detonation, and the vocals sound less performed than forcibly expelled from somewhere beneath the floorboards. But here's the important part: FAM understands the slam. They don't blast endlessly just because they can. They let the riffs drop, drag, and fucking hit. "Agony Becomes Divine" is particularly nasty about it, moving from grind acceleration into those lumbering, neck-destroying passages where every snare hit feels like another boot landing in your ribs.

Dismembered Identity | YouTube Music

There is something wonderfully primitive about the whole thing. Not stupid. Primitive. Big difference. FAM knows exactly what they're doing and knows damn well that sometimes three ugly notes played with murderous conviction beat thirty pretty ones played for applause.

Then "Perverse Devotion" comes crawling through the wreckage and demonstrates why Pleasure of Torture works as more than twenty-nine minutes of interchangeable brutality. There is actual pacing here. Riffs breathe just long enough to become memorable before FAM bulldozes them into the next section, while "Pain Protocol" barely clears two minutes and behaves like it has somewhere else to be after murdering you. That's the grindcore bloodline showing itself. No wasted motion. No atmospheric interlude featuring a distant church bell. No seven-minute meditation on mankind's existential decay. Fuck that. Riff. Blast. Slam. Growl. Repeat until structurally unsound. "Dead Eyes...Still Watching" might be the album's nastiest little bastard, a compact demonstration of how effectively FAM can make tempo itself feel threatening.

Perverse Devotion | YouTube Music

What keeps Pleasure of Torture from disappearing into the overcrowded brutal-death sewer is its sense of groove. Listen to "Predator Awareness" or the wonderfully titled "I am the Monster." Beneath all the blasting, gutturals, and intestinal guitar tone are riffs designed to make bodies move. FAM comes from the European grind tradition—they've shared stages with Napalm Death, Suffocation, Incantation, Defeated Sanity, Rotten Sound, Anaal Nathrakh and plenty of other professional manufacturers of tinnitus—and you can hear that accumulated mileage. This doesn't sound like musicians discovering brutality. It sounds like lifers who stopped giving a shit whether you can keep up. The closing "Ofiara," a cover of Polish death/grind outfit Necrophil, is therefore less a bonus-track novelty than FAM planting another flag in the underground that produced them.

And that's Pleasure of Torture: no reinvention, no bullshit, no desperate attempt to convince anyone that brutal death/grind needs saving. FAM simply walks into the room, plugs in, and starts removing teeth.

Dead Eyes...Still Watching | YouTube Music

Twenty years after forming, they're still operating with the enthusiasm of a band that has something to prove and the confidence of one that absolutely doesn't. It's disgusting without becoming cartoonish, technical without jerking itself off, and heavy in that glorious old-fashioned sense where you involuntarily make the face—the goddamn, that riff is fucking stupid-heavy face.

FAM isn't asking for your pleasure. Despite the title, they're much more interested in the torture. Turn it up and cooperate. The new album can be unearthed here or wherever the filthiest of metal can be found.