Iron Maiden once asked Can I Play With Madness? Stench of Sorcery answered with a battlefield full of corpses and a hard fucking yes.
There are metal albums. Then there are albums that sound like they were dragged screaming from beneath a ruined cathedral after a thousand-year siege, still dripping ash, blood, and grave dirt onto the stone floor. Stench of Sorcery arrive from Catalonia swinging a rusted executioner’s blade directly at the throat of modern sterile death metal with The Palegold Menace, a record so drenched in cursed lore, dungeon grime, war banners, black magic, and undead misery that it practically exhales grave dust through the speakers. “Castle Metal” sounds ridiculous right up until this monstrous bastard starts moving. Then suddenly you’re knee-deep in mud outside the burning gates of Targalor while corpses rain from trebuchets and some doomed king screams prophecies into the blackened sky. This thing fucking RULES.
Led by Jaume Roca Roca, with Gerard Busquets and Luís Vargas helping drag this cursed thing out of the crypt, The Palegold Menace is gloriously old-school without collapsing into nostalgia-bait cosplay bullshit. No overproduced plastic sheen. No trigger-happy robot drums sterilized into oblivion. This thing sounds rotten and mean as hell. The riffs don’t politely introduce themselves — they burst through the castle gates covered in blood and cemetery dirt. “Fear Facer (The Palegold Menace)” stomps in like the march of an army already damned by dark gods, while “Stain of Suspicion” reeks of paranoia and spiritual decay, like somebody poisoned the kingdom’s well with corpse ash and betrayal. You can practically smell wet chainmail and torch smoke hanging over these songs. Every second feels damp and diseased, like the whole record’s rotting in real time.
And holy shit, the LORE. Not fake “we skimmed a fantasy wiki once” lore either. This is the kind of lore you only get when somebody’s genuinely lost their fucking mind over a fantasy world and decided the only reasonable response was to turn it into death metal. Alric, the fallen king of Targalor, wandering the Execrated Lands as a half-dead shell under the influence of Gorth, is exactly the kind of deranged sword-and-sorcery storytelling metal desperately needs more of. “Here in the Dark” feels like a forbidden ritual buried beneath a mountain while hooded lunatics chant around a pit of black fire. “Warden of the Last Dawn Light” carries this doomed heroic weight that sounds like the final stand of the last decent man in a world already rotting from the inside out. Then “The Stench of Sorcery” detonates into pure occult warfare — necromancy, demonology, theurgy, kingdoms collapsing into filth and madness beneath the shadow of dead gods. It’s excessive and theatrical and completely out of its damn mind. Exactly as it should be.
What makes The Palegold Menace hit so hard though is how it keeps escalating. By the second half the whole album is basically on fire. The riffs crawl into your skull and just stay there for days while the whole record spirals deeper into apocalyptic ruin. There’s this filthy addictive pulse running through the album — old Swedish death metal grime fused with epic heavy metal grandeur and dungeon-crawling atmosphere without ever turning goofy or bloated. “Alric’s Deadly Omen” sounds like a man realizing he’s already spiritually dead while still hacking through enemies out of pure hatred and momentum. “Superstition 33: Eternal Demand” pushes everything into full-scale annihilation. Then “Grudgeborn (Accursed be He, the Doomwalker)” closes the album like the soundtrack to some rune-covered titan marching across a battlefield littered with burning saints, shattered crowns, and smoking corpses. I don’t even know what else to call this thing besides ridiculous. I had a stupid grin on my face the entire time.
This album doesn’t feel released. It feels SUMMONED. Like somebody cracked open a sealed crypt beneath a forgotten fortress and this foul majestic thing crawled out carrying a banner soaked in blood and candle wax. The Palegold Menace is raw, obsessive, ugly, triumphant, dramatic, and completely fucking committed to its world. No irony either. Thank Christ. Just riffs, ruin, sorcery, war, doom, and the smell of death echoing through ancient stone halls while kingdoms collapse beneath blackened skies.
Castle Metal? Sign me the fuck up.
Stench of Sorcery’s The Palegold Menace can be summoned here’s The Palegold Menace can be summoned here or where the finest of old school metal records are unearthed.
