THY ART IS MURDER ascended the ranks of extreme metal’s top-tier bands with a meteoric underground rise as explosive as humankind’s seemingly inevitable descent into doom and death.
Australia’s most harrowingly brutal export since George Miller’s Mad Max franchise invites audiences worldwide to join them in a fresh Armageddon. A soundtrack to a divisive postmodern dystopia.
Two-time ARIA Music Awards nominees and tourmates with genre-titans like Cannibal Corpse, Slayer, Kreator, Lamb Of God, and Killswitch Engage, THY ART IS MURDER offers a savage take on blackened death metal combined with a heady but accessible approach to social commentary.
Songs like “Reign of Darkness,” “Atonement,” “The Purest Strain of Hate,” and “Puppet Master” became anthems for outsiders, those who dare to challenge, provoke, and resist the dark world around them. They make dark, chaotic, nihilistic, heavy music with sharp smarts beneath its surface.
The first group of its kind to crack the Top 40 on the ARIA Charts, the Sydney-born band has charted higher than any other homegrown extreme metal outfit in their native country. The “deathcore” rumblings of an early demo and EP, recorded when the original lineup were teenagers, opened the door to the genuine death metal force Thy Art Is Murder would become.
Their first album, The Adversary (2010), is a classic with heightened aggression well beyond most of their contemporaries.
Thy Art Is Murder first worked with Putney (A Day To Remember, Knocked Loose, The Ghost Inside) on Hate, which arrived in 2012 via Halfcut Records and earned a broader release in 2013 via Nuclear Blast.
The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the music video for the title track from Holy War (2015) sparked heated discussions with its graphic depictions of torture and violence. Despite the controversy and conversation, the Australian edition of Rolling Stone awarded the album four stars.
Dear Desolation (2017), which Metal Injection described as “a pounding adrenaline rush,” debuted in the Top 100 in the US and Australia’s Top 5.
As Kerrang! wrote upon the release of Human Target (2019), “When it comes to this stuff, few are capable of doing it with such devastating expertise.”
Marsh notes the ambitious but controlled pace of their continued creative evolution.
On Godlike, as with every album prior, “The dissonance in my mind between what we sound like and what I imagine we should sound like gets closer together.”
MetalSucks put Thy Art Is Murder among the Top 50 Most Popular Metal Bands Right Now, According to the Internet (based on page views), next to Metallica, Slipknot, Ghost, and Iron Maiden. Six albums in and with electrifying performances in clubs and theaters across the globe and at crucial festivals like Summer Breeze, Download, Graspop, and Wacken, it’s easy to understand why.
