RAW IS THE LAW

Type: EP

Release date: April 26, 2025

Formats: 12" Vinyl, Digital

NOISE MANIAKK - rhythm/lead guitars, bass (tracks 1, 2, 3), lead/backing vocals

GIANCARLO TUCCIO - drums (tracks 3, 4)

ER MAGNOTTA 666 - drums (track 1)

CICCIO PALADINO - drums (track 2)

GABRIELE NICOTRA - bass (track 4)

All songs written by Noise Maniakk in late 2022 (except "From the depths of Satania", written in late 2018).

Recorded 2023-2024.

Mixed/mastered by Noise Maniakk & Er Magnotta 666.

Cover art by Claudio Elias Scialabba (Visual Aggression Zine).

Noise Maniakk's perspective

"Raw is the law" is both a celebration and a declaration of war.

The fact that it came out in 2025 - the year Rotgod turns exactly ten - is just a happy, timely coincidence. However, taking notice of said coincidence, I decided 100% intentionally to make the release date (april 26th) coincide with the night when, back in 2015, I wrote my very first song "Denial of nature" - de facto, starting to lay the ground for the "Sonic degeneracy" album: so, that's pretty much Rotgod's birthday if there has to be one. That's the perfect time to release an EP carrying such an inflammatory, radical statement, so representative of what's always been the nature of this project: on a musical level, "Raw is the law" is Rotgod's full-fledged manifesto!

Which brings us to the "declaration of war" I was speaking of earlier.

2022 was the year concerts finally restarted for good after two years of pandemic, it was the year I for one started going out more often after some years of isolation while working on "Sonic degeneracy" - but it also was the year I was hit with a crushing realization. Getting back into the local metal scene, I noticed quite a huge generational turnover compared to pre-pandemic times, getting to know many new faces - some welcome (I met my dear friend Leo, alias Shax, right around that time), some much less so. I soon realized that, during the pandemic years, with social isolation and YouTube, TikTok and Spotify on hand (add to that the influence of the "Lords of chaos" movie, released just one year prior to the pandemic), a new generation of self-proclaimed metalheads had flourished - though one entirely reliant on web 2.0 algorithm trends, and devoid of any curiosity and initiative to explore by themselves. I saw band that were "underground" the day before suddenly exploding online, becoming viral and blindly idolized everywhere due to such algorithmic dynamics, fostered by the online metal media hype machine including Decibel Magazine, MetalSucks and others. I started noticing some rather disturbing patterns, such as the bastardization and commodification of the old school death metal revival (which I had followed enthusiastically over the previous decade) at the hands of labels such as Maggot Stomp, providing a "vintage", "underground" package to bands that in substance sounded more akin to the first Suicide Silence record released back in 2007 - at the peak of the dreadful "MySpace deathcore" era. All the so-called "underground" scene, all of a sudden, started looking more and more similar in its underlying dynamics to the awful mainstream metal scene from that older era (2007-2011), which I only barely experienced but still remember very well. Who's old enough to have gotten into metal during the web 1.0 era will certainly remember the overabundance of "metal kiddies" whose knowledge didn't go beyond your usual classics discovered through YouTube and Wikipedia (Metallica, Iron Maiden, Pantera, Black Sabbath...) and a few more recent names which at the time were being hyped up as metal's "next big thing", releasing albums on huge labels, while not being particularly representative of the subgenres they were normally associated with: thus, it wasn't rare to see said metal kiddies mention Children of Bodom, Arch Enemy or even In Flames as representative examples of death metal, Dragonforce as representative examples of power metal, Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth as representative examples of black metal (to put things into perspective: we're already talking of a post-2000 scenario, when these bands had already abandoned their original styles), or even Trivium as an example of thrash outside of the Big 4, simply because they knew no better and they lacked all the historical background to connect the dots from point A (the aforementioned 80's classics) to point B (the hyped up bands of the moment). Of course, these types of people were looked at with scorn and disdain by those who, like myself, possessed the bare minimum of curiosity that's needed to explore the music genre you claim to love in a methodical way, not dependent upon flavor-of-the-week/word-of-mouth trends. Well - the approach "metal kiddies" from that era had to the metal genre as a whole is the same I recognize in many of today's so-called "old school death metal" fans: preposterous worship for your usual late-80's/early-90's classics everyone and their mother knows (Death, Morbid Angel, Entombed, Obituary, Cannibal Corpse...), then a massive time gap up to the most recent flavor-of-the-week retro names - as if nothing interesting happened within the realm of traditional death metal over the course of this long ass timespan, and the genre's "resurgence" is occurring only now that the online influencer is telling you. No wonder a band like Blood Incantation, hyped up to insane levels by all metal media in recent years, will look like absolute maverick geniuses who came out of nowhere to these kids whose musical diet rarely goes beyond Entombed and 200 Stab Wounds, therefore ignoring the essential 90's background that's so apparent in Blood Incantation's music - including bands such as Demilich, Timeghoul, The Chasm and obviously Immolation. I suspect even Blood Incantation themselves might not be happy with the audience they have garnered being so uncritical and susceptible to trends - since they, for one, started making music during a time period when certain styles were entirely "untrendy", swimming against the very tides that are now favoring them.

And herein lies the problem: from the roots of the "underground" scene spawned over the last two decades, in the name of old school resistance against modern mainstream metal, a "new mainstream" of an even more insidious kind is now flourishing - championing "old school", "nostalgia-bait" rhetoric, while often just paying lip service to it in a very superficial fashion, and still watering it down with tropes that are often no less "modern" and trendy in nature (as in the case of Maggot Stomp's roster, which over time has moved closer and closer to slam, groove and modern hardcore - with all those dumb Pit Viper sunglasses giving off instant "white boy summer" vibes, yikes). The sad truth is - the "underground" black and death metal bands that are currently enjoying virality amongst kids are filling the same space bands like Arch Enemy, In Flames, Children of Bodom, Trivium and Dragonforce used to fill for metal kiddies back in the web 1.0 era: same blind hype, same bland lack of curiosity and historical background outside what the algorithm and media dictate. Terms like "old school" and "underground" have now been reduced to empty slogans, mere tokens working as social unifiers for teens looking for an identity and a space to fit in - therefore, entirely useless for who's "simply" looking for exciting, worthwhile forms of extreme music.

It's with all that in mind that, during autumn 2022, I wrote the songs "Raw is the law" and "Goth black metal tradcunt" - reaffirming the supremacy of 80's underground (the kind of underground that has always inspired me as Rotgod, which all these "old school blacksters/deathsters" of today don't even know the existence of) and attacking modern trends along with their audiences with utmost vehemence.

Recordings for the "Polemics and obscenity" EPs (which I finished writing earlier that year) were about to begin, but unfortunately during that autumn I was stuck at home with a cast on my foot after some bastards ran over me with their mopeds while I was crossing the street: that was truly a nightmarish experience on too many levels, and now the only things I could do to kill time while staying home were listening to music and writing some new stuff. Right around that time, my inspiration and productivity got once and for all back to "Sonic degeneracy" era levels, which led me to create some killer new projects such as Black Katharsis: hate always seems to be a good motivator - and by that time, I was truly overdosing on it. Thinking back to how hectic and agitated I was at the time, I almost get scared. Even the EP's cover art (which was also sketched out around the same time - before being given to the skillful hands of Claudio Elias Scialabba), while being blatantly ironic, sure does not go for subtlety with all the blood being shed. "Raw is the law" does indeed continue the process of "hardening" Rotgod's general attitude that begun with "Polemics and obscenity": songs are mostly very straightforward, bare-bones and strictly functional - though slightly less obsessed with overt "catchiness" compared to "Polemics and obscenity", preferring to focus on crudeness, primitivism and "noisiness" in a way that ties more directly back to the 80s; plus, silly thrashcore-style humor keeps being pushed more and more to the corner compared to "Sonic degeneracy" - materializing only into "From the depths of Satania" (for which I wrote the music back in 2018 together with the earliest material for "Polemics and obscenity", and whose lyrics are just straight-up lifted from Sito Esaurito's hilarious classic "Catania is burning") and a few audio skits scattered in between the songs to cool things off a little bit, just like on "Polemics and obscenity". Well, there's quite a bit of irony on "Goth black metal tradcunt" as well - but to call said irony "mean-spirited" would be an understatement: the lyrics target your usual nerdy/doomer-ish kid with reactionary-traditionalist ideas (generally having Jordan Peterson as a personal guru, I suppose) who discovered Këkht Aräkh on TikTok, had a "literally me" moment seeing him dressed up as a romantic knight with the sword and the rose, and from that point on he built an entire personality on being a Këkht Aräkh fanboy; well, these lyrics reach straight-up Anal Cunt levels of malice, cruelty and poor taste in mocking and bullying our protagonist and wishing him the worst death possible, making the older "Kill your hipster neighbor" lyrics look much more bland and benign by comparison - something I'm honestly very proud of.

As a matter of fact, "Raw is the law" establishes Rotgod's new direction once and for all, following earlier hints from "Polemics and obscenity": hate, hate, hate, just hate, contempt, gratuitous cruelty against everyone, and wishing for random homicides and terminal illnesses Dario Greggio style. This is perhaps the first work I've written with a fully-blossomed "elitist" approach in mind - that being, the idea that most people deserve nothing more than eating shit, and only a select few (those I try to surround myself with in my day-to-day life, which I also hope are the ones to truly engage and connect with the music that I make) are really worth anything - therefore, distrusting in advance any context of "social aggregation": wherever there's a "social" component, wherever there's the intent to "speak to your average flesh-and-blood people from the street", there's also the virus for watering everything down in order to make it approachable for everyone - just like trendy faux-old school death metal dumbing down its underground roots with blatant "populist" influences such as slam and beatdown.

To sum it up, "Raw is the law" is a fuck-off to the so-called "scene", the much-lauded "scene" which is underground in name and name only (some people use the derogatory term "funderground" to define it more accurately), and the populist dynamics poisoning it from within, putting social aggregation and inclusion before the integrity of the music itself (by the way: I think this "populist" sentiment trying to "unite everyone" was the weak link inherent to the hardcore genre, which is perhaps the reason why from the 90s onward it started sucking worse and worse - becoming either more and more boneheaded and bro-minded in the case of beatdown, or alternatively more and more whiny and juvenile in the case of so-called "emo", which actually has nothing to do with the original emocore bands from the 80s). Pushing back against all these collectivist drives, my position on "Raw is the law" is much more blatant than in the past: lyrics from the title-track recite "long live antisocial music" (always envisioning scenarios of mass extermination for the trendy kids, championing italian youtuber Daniele Montesi from The Suckerz channel as a primary example), while the record's back reads "2015-2025: ten years of raw antisocial noise against all trends". Antisociality as Rotgod's core essence, being an artistic entity with an individualistic vision instead of a collectivistic one.

The only digression from this path filled with hate, venom, poor-taste ragebaits and underground extremism is represented by "Garden of God כַּרְמֶל (paradise lost)" - an anomalous track to say the least, for Rotgod's usual standards. I've had my fair share of melancholic ruminations in the past, such as "Inner crisis (massive negation)", but this song truly goes beyond previous instances - owing more to the "tragic", decadent melodies from the 90's gothic/death/doom scene (Tiamat, My Dying Bride, Anathema and of course, well, Paradise Lost haha!) than any 80's thrash/grind/proto-death/proto-black record. Someone might wonder the reason for such a detour, especially right in the midst of such a radical hate-mongering beast of an EP. It's difficult to explain indeed. This song was also written during my late-2022 recovery time, back when I was out of my fucking mind, and yet the mood feels much more calm, relaxed and contemplative compared to the other tracks, even during the faster thrash sections. Actually, once again (same as "From the depths of Satania"), some of the main melodic ideas for this song were already laid out by 2018, and saved just for the right time to be used. Perhaps, by that point, I just felt the need to settle the past once and for all (taking advantage of the "freedom" given by the EP format) - already knowing deep down there would be no more space for such "mellower" digressions (see: The Ineffable) in my future works, which by that time were shaping up to be increasingly focused on pure straightforward sonic extremism (as shown by all my recent side-projects).

Lyrics for this song are also interesting: it's basically a hypothetical sequel to my older staple "The serpent's speech", where things turn out much worse compared to the wishes I had expressed in those older lyrics from 2017. I've already explained in detail in the booklet's foreword how this paradigm shift reflects my decreased faith in humanity compared to the "Sonic degeneracy" era, so I won't repeat myself here. I'll just say, I was indeed feeling awful - spectacularly awful - during my recovery time back then, and I think this is pretty fucking evident from the "Garden of God כַּרְמֶל" lyrics (and yeah, the jewish writing in the title means something too); plus, writing sequels to destroy your own past creations, killing off your own characters in the harshest ways, is a damn fun activity I should perhaps do more often - as the sadistic fan service hater I am.

While I was working on "Raw is the law", starting to consider the idea of releasing it for Rotgod's tenth anniversary, I also decided to include some celebrative bonus tracks for the digital edition. So I came back to one of the many alternate mixes for "Denial of nature" left on the cutting room floor at the time of finalizing "Sonic degeneracy", back in 2021. "Denial of nature" is, for those who don't know, a damn important song for me - moreso than other better-known tracks such as "Sybaritic metal" or "Uncertain future": aside from being the very first song I wrote for Rotgod - on that fateful night between april 25 and 26, 2015 - it's also one of my favorites riff-wise and songwriting-wise, and it outlined my vision for primitive underground metal right from the get-go - interweaving razor-sharp Merciless-style thrash riffing with more elaborate, death metal-ish tapestries, all over a frantic, pulsating, relentless beat straight out of a 1987 demo. However, mixing-wise, it's one of the songs I feel least satisfied with in all "Sonic degeneracy": even compared to soundalike tracks (such as "Without dogmas" or "The serpent's speech", which posed me no issues at mixing stage), something for "Denial of nature" just didn't turn out right, and sadly I realized it too late into the process, finding myself with no other choice but to withhold the guitars a little bit in the mix, for the sake of aligning the sound to all other tracks from the album. I remember, back in 2021, sweating nervously while working my ass off 'till the very end on the mix/master for "Denial of nature", before calling it quits once and for all, therefore finishing "Sonic degeneracy" for good: it all had started with "Denial", and it all ended with "Denial".

However, I still had this unused mix on my hard drive, which sounded pretty much like the total opposite of the one I'd approved back then: a thick, cavernous, near-sulfurous sound, with the lows turned up to eleven, placing much more emphasis on the guitar riffs (whose fundamental frequencies were mostly in the lower range indeed) rather than the drums. So I took this older mix, "polished" and "smoothened" it up with some mastering - just enough to make it listenable without the inconvenience of any subwoofer exploding at first contact - and jokingly renamed it "Denial of treble swamp mix". I'm not saying this version is superior, or that it has to be seen as "the definitive version" (if not even "the fixed patch") made to replace the original, since I happen to think this kind of stuff is despicable (right, Dave Mustaine?). I don't even think this new mix solves all the problems the original had, since the source material remains exactly the same, with all its frustrating technical limitations being present already at recording stage: this was just a chance to hear "Denial of nature" from a different perspective, with more emphasis placed on those killer deathrash riffs I hold so dear - worrying no more about making the sound fall in line with the other tracks, being this a standalone bonus track. The older mix's flaws are the strengths of the new one, while the weaknesses of this new mix are the older one's strengths. It's up to you to decide which one is your favorite!

So - to wrap it up: the way I'd like "Raw is the law" to be remembered in the future would be as a watershed in Rotgod's career. By celebrating ten years of activity for this wretched project, I got the chance to take a look at the past, tie up a few loose ends, vent out some of the rage I had amassed over the course of the decade, while at the same time setting up a new direction (already foreshadowed by past tracks such as "Insipid metal", from "Polemics and obscenity") that can be summed up as being much more hateful and openly belligerent against trends, so-called "alternative" spaces and the so-called "funderground" - which is currently replacing the true underground, made the way our Lord Tom G. Warrior intended. To silence any possible objection from modern death/black metal normies, I have included on the back of the booklet a comprehensive "top 30" list of songs that fully embody and represent my true roots as a musician - the true, raw 80's noise that inspires me as Rotgod, both from well-known bands (such as Napalm Death, Sodom, Destruction and even Death, for which I picked a hidden gem from their demo era) and cult bands only true ones know (Necrobutcher, Holocausto, Parabellum, Chronical Diarrhoea, Necrovomit, Nuclear Death). As I state in the lyrics from "Raw is the law": "being underground" doesn't just mean being an unknown up-and-coming act - rather, it indicates a specific approach to metal: bands such as Bütcher, Blasphamagoatachrist, The Chasm, Bloody Vengeance, Axis of Advance and Mephitic Corpse are obviously more popular compared to your usual hometown band trying to ape modern Dimmu Borgir, but they're still undoubtedly more "underground" in spirit and general approach.

"Raw is the law" is also important for me on a personal level, thinking back to my state of mind at the time I wrote it, in late 2022: as I mentioned earlier, that was the beginning of a cycle of renewed inspiration for me as a songwriter, after warming up the engines with "Polemics and obscenity" and The Ineffable; from this new cycle, of course, would come all my most recent side-projects such Black Katharsis, Foetophile and others still in the works, plus obviously the second Rotgod album I've been working on since 2023. I find it sad that this renewal of my musical vision and inspiration had to take place following such negative events in my personal life, but something in my head did sure change significantly around that time, and "Raw is the law" is a symptom of such change - of which you'll soon be able to taste the ripest, juiciest fruits.

COGUMELO SOUND FOR LIFE!

Articles

• Raw is the law: Ten years of Rotgod

• Rotgod's Art: Raw is the law

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