Extreme Metal’s Bloodstained Birth Certificate: The Story of Reek of Putrefaction

“We were just three teenagers that wanted to cause havoc,” recalled Carcass guitarist Bill Steer with a wry grin. Looking back on their 1988 debut Reek of Putrefaction, the Liverpool trio’s intent couldn’t have been clearer. "We were priding ourselves on having made a very offensive album. We wanted everything about it to be unpalatable: music, lyrics, cover. I guess we achieved it."

To call Reek “unpalatable” is like calling a nuclear detonation “mildly disruptive.” This was not an album; it was a crime scene. A sonic splatterhouse of frantic drum blasts, subhuman grunts, and riffs downtuned to the earth’s molten core. It sounded like hardcore punk as interpreted by a trio of deranged morticians. It wasn’t just music—it was a sensory assault, from its deliberately grotesque lyrics to the stomach-churning cover art featuring a collage of cadavers in varying states of distress. Yet, in all its gore-smeared chaos, Reek of Putrefaction achieved something extraordinary: it birthed a genre, goregrind, and redefined the outer limits of what extreme metal could be.

The making of Reek of Putrefaction is a tale of youthful exuberance meeting logistical disaster. Recorded over four rushed days at Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham, the album was plagued by technical incompetence and poor studio conditions. The band had neither the experience nor the resources to translate their feral energy into a polished product. "Reek sounds the way it does just because we didn’t know any better," Steer admitted in a 1992 interview with Disposable Underground. "We were totally inexperienced as far as studio work went, and it really showed in the end result. The album is completely sloppy. We hated it at the time."

But what the band saw as a failure turned out to be a masterstroke in hindsight. The raw, murky production became an aesthetic cornerstone, its imperfections amplifying the sense of disorder and dread. This wasn’t music for the faint-hearted. It was the sound of a genre being dragged, kicking and screaming, into existence.

If the sound was chaotic, the album’s imagery was sheer calculated provocation. Bassist and vocalist Jeff Walker, armed with a morbid sense of humor and his sister’s nursing dictionary, crafted lyrics that read like an autopsy report on hallucinogens. Titles such as “Vomited Anal Tract” and “Carbonized Eye Sockets” left no room for subtlety. The visuals were equally audacious. Encouraged by Earache Records founder Digby Pearson, Walker pieced together the now-infamous cover art—a grotesque collage of autopsy photographs culled from forensic medicine books. "Dig basically wanted something more extreme than Big Black’s Headache cover," Walker told Brave Words in 2003. Mission accomplished.

What’s remarkable is how this gore-soaked aesthetic wasn’t mere shock for shock’s sake. It was a deliberate challenge to the sanitized conventions of music and society at large. Carcass didn’t just want to upset people; they wanted to create something utterly unrepeatable. "That first album, we thought, 'We’ll be a one-album band. Hopefully, this record will get censored, so we’ll have this cool, credible, underground album,'" Walker said to Rolling Stone. "Unfortunately, it backfired, and we were taken seriously."

The backlash was both swift and polarizing. Critics dismissed the album as unlistenable noise, while underground metalheads reveled in its audacity. But amid the controversy, Reek of Putrefaction found an unlikely champion in legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who declared it his favorite album of 1988. For an album that many dismissed as a grotesque joke, it climbed to No. 6 on the UK Indie Chart, cementing Carcass’s status as pioneers of a new frontier in extremity.

Make no mistake—Reek of Putrefaction was a full-blown sonic revolution. It fused the frenetic chaos of grindcore with the guttural savagery of death metal, creating something entirely unprecedented. Its influence on subsequent acts like Exhumed, General Surgery, and Aborted is immeasurable. Carcass had planted a flag on the most disgusting peak of extreme music, and legions of bands would follow in their blood-soaked footsteps.

For all its groundbreaking qualities, Carcass themselves were ambivalent about their creation. "We just look back on it with amusement more than anything," Steer admitted. Walker echoed the sentiment, explaining that the band’s technical naivety left them dissatisfied with the result. "None of us thought of ourselves as virtuosos," he told Brave Words. "What we lacked in technique, we made up for in ideas and imagination."

This creativity would drive Carcass’s evolution in the years to come. From the surgical precision of Symphonies of Sickness to the melodic sophistication of Heartwork, they grew into one of extreme metal’s most respected bands. But Reek of Putrefaction* remains their most anarchic and uncompromising statement.

Beyond introducing Carcass to the world, Reek staked a claim to defining a new genre. Goregrind took the primal energy of grindcore and injected it with an almost cinematic sense of horror. It wasn’t just heavy—it was visceral, grotesque, and unrelentingly extreme. The genre’s DNA is encoded in every decayed riff and blast beat of Reek, from its medical jargon lyrics to its morbid humor. As Walker once put it, "At the end of the day, it’s just rock and roll—albeit faster and heavier."

Reek of Putrefaction looms large over extreme metal as a foundational landmark. It’s the sound of a band exploding into existence with no filter, no restraint, and no concern for palatability. In doing so, Carcass inadvertently created a blueprint for a genre that remains as unrelenting and uncompromising as the album itself.

Carcass didn’t set out to make history—they set out to make havoc. But in their quest to offend and unsettle, they achieved something far greater. They redefined the boundaries of metal, leaving behind a legacy as raw, unpolished, and unforgettable as Reek of Putrefaction itself.