Gore-obsessed, old-school death metal

“I LIKE DEATH metal to be brutal and fast, so I usually write those kinds of tracks.”

Bloodbath guitarist Tomas Åkvik is matter-of-factly getting into why his three compositions on the long-running death metal supergroup’s new Survival of the Sickest full-length (“Zombie Inferno,” “Malignant Maggot Therapy” and “Environcide”) arguably push the speed-barrier more so than his bandmates’ nevertheless grotesque contributions. “I’m a raging person,” he chuckles when Guitar World presses him on the point. What’s most surprising about this ferociously paced feat, though, is that Åkvik even brought the songs to Bloodbath in the first place.

While the Swedish guitarist has been riffing with Bloodbath as their live guitarist for more than five years, when the group formally asked him to join full-time — following the 2017 exit of Per “Sodomizer” Eriksson — he initially declined. The decision was dumbfounding, even to him.

“I don’t know what got into me, but I was already playing in too many bands, so when they asked me to join, I was like, ‘It’s not the right time,’” Åkvik — who also leads Swedish metal force Lik — says. “It sounds a bit cocky [to have declined], but [I was] very honored that they asked me. I just didn’t want to disappoint them by not being able to commit.”

That Åkvik appears throughout the ruthless Survival of the Sickest means he obviously carved out time for Bloodbath; the pandemic helped with that. Also, while 2018’s The Arrow of Satan is Drawn lurked in the blasphemous mire of black metal, founding guitarist Anders Nyström told Åkvik that Survival of the Sickest would bring Bloodbath back to their roots: gore-obsessed, old-school death metal. The premise intrigued Åkvik, even reminding him of his teenage years taping international broadcasts of MTV’s Headbangers Ball to discover the metal extremists of the Eighties and early Nineties.

Though Bloodbath’s metal pedigree includes past and present members of Katatonia (Nyström and bassist Jonas Renske) and Opeth (drummer Martin Axenrot), it’s clear that Survival of the Sickest is a blunt-force homage to Florida-based legends like Death, Morbid Angel and Obituary, who had tracked genre-codifying classics at Tampa’s iconic Morrisound studios. Or, in the case of Åkvik’s relentlessly thrashed, dive-intensive “Zombie Inferno” — in part inspired by Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains — records that were at the very least engineered by the studio’s formidable Scott Burns.

Tha