A Curse That Lingers Long After The Last Bell Tolls: PUTRED – Blestemul din Adânc (The Curse from the Deep) (Album Review) Released: 3/20/26

 

From the mist-choked valleys of Transylvania, a rot has been spreading since 2020. PUTRED, the name itself, a Romanian word meaning putrid, rotten, decayed, has never been interested in subtlety. Their third full-length, Blestemul din Adânc (The Curse from the Deep), arrives as a suffocating burial rite, an album that drags you beneath the earth and seals the lid above you before you have time to scream. What makes PUTRED remarkable, beyond the sheer filth of their sound, is their insistence on performing almost entirely in their native Romanian tongue, a rarity among extreme metal bands from their country and a deliberate act of cultural defiance. The language lends the material an otherworldly, ancient quality; these are curses that predate the modern world, whispered through crumbling stone and black earth.

The album opens with Pandemonium, an intro that lives up to its name: dissonant, churning, a slow collapse before the detonation. When Sfâșiat… Stigmatizat (Torn Apart… Stigmatized) erupts, it is immediate and merciless. Filip's vocals are a guttural excavation, dredging syllables from somewhere sub-human, while the twin guitar assault of Uriel and Denis constructs walls of sound that don't merely distort, they decompose in real time. The title track is the centrepiece and a mission statement. Dense, mid-paced, and suffocating, it embodies everything the album promises: guitars corroded to near-sludge, percussion that feels less like drumming and more like stone grinding against stone, and a bass from Corina that pulses beneath it all like a dying heartbeat in a flooded tomb. Ficus on drums hits with deliberate, punishing weight, never showing off, always serving the decay.

Cripta Vrăjilor (The Crypt of Spells) and Devorat de Întuneric (Devoured by Darkness) continue to mine this vein of molten horror, the former particularly effective in its use of tempo shifts, brief accelerations that feel like panic before the mud swallows you again. Groapa Oaselor (The Pit of Bones) and Catacombe Sângerii (Bloody Catacombs) sustain the album's suffocating atmosphere without overstaying their welcome, a credit to the band's songwriting discipline. Ultimul Clopot (The Last Bell) is a fittingly bleak closer to the Romanian-language material, its title evoking finality and funerary ceremony. Then comes the album's lone pivot: a crushing cover of Benediction's Subconscious Terror. It's a choice that contextualises PUTRED's lineage without apology, a nod to the British death metal forefathers delivered with genuine venom and not an ounce of nostalgia.


Blestemul din Adânc is not an album that courts comfort or accessibility. It is deliberately, unapologetically ugly, a slow-decaying monument of raw, rotting death metal rooted in a specific place, a specific language, and a specific commitment to sonic decomposition. PUTRED is building something rare in underground metal: a body of work with a true identity. This is their most cohesive and compelling statement yet, and it deserves to be heard by anyone willing to descend into the dark.

Check out their track Devorat de Întuneric (Devoured by Darkness):

Go give them a follow on Instagram: PUTRED