Combining first-wave Satanic black metal, Japanese hardcore, Yankee d-beat, and swirling death rock, Philadelphia's Devil Master are an extreme music outfit who don't care about artificial genre boundaries. They thrash, wail, drone, and shred while they worship the Evil One and his minions. But Devil Master treat the unwholesome -- eternal damnation, horror, misery, unholy union with the undead -- as causes for celebration and humor, not planks in a dour pseudo-religious platform. Their debut compilation, Manifestations on Relapse (which combines their first demos and a single), delivers an intense and masterful combination of their chosen musical tenets with a gleeful sense of mischief that they also display live with props and pranks (from corpse paint on their faces to giant spider webs on-stage that audience members freely engage with).

Devil Master were founded in 2016 by five friends (some of whom are bona fide Satanists) who go by aliases: Lead guitarist Dark Prince, rhythm guitarist Hades Apparition, vocalist Disembody, drummer Del, and bassist Spirit Mirror. They were joined later by keyboardist Dodder. When they joined forces, Devil Master's members were already performing in various bands on Philly's hardcore and metal scenes (Dark Prince is Francis Kano, the live bassist from Integrity; Spirit Mirror fronts post-punk outfit Blank Spell, and Dodder is a member of Grave Spell). All were deeply influenced by Japanese hardcore -- particularly the bands G.I.S.M. and Zouo -- and the attack and imagery of early black metal acts such as Venom, Celtic Frost, and Bathory, as well as death rockers from the Hell Comes to Your House dimension of L.A. rock, and post-punk such as Christian Death and 45 Grave. As a collective, these cats felt no compunction to limit themselves to one particular style and thus combined them all.

Their initial self-titled cassette demo, adorned in pink accents and occult imagery, disappeared as quickly it was issued thanks to social media. As the band's rep spread on Twitter and Instagram, word of the music -- and copies of the tape -- spread globally. The band's collision of styles proved irresistible to extreme music fans. By the time they issued their single, "Obscene Charade," to Bandcamp a year later, they were already being written about all over the metal press. They rushed out another cassette that year, the four-song, one-sided Inhabit the Corpse, which sold out immediately. Relapse, a veteran label in showcasing rock's extremes, signed the band late in the year and compiled all their previous releases as Manifestations, an eight-track, 23-minute album, remixed and remastered by Arthur Rizk (Sumerlands, Power Trip). It was issued in 2018. Playing outside Philly on the American festival circuit, Devil Master's manic, ferocious, yet good-time stage show and incendiary sound were greeted with rabid enthusiasm by fans and punters who had no idea who they were. At year’s end, Relapse put the band in a Philly studio with Rizk and recorded their raw, lo-fi, debut full-length Satan Spits on Children of Light, which combined their cross-genre preferences with unhealthy lyrics of misanthropic humor and spiritual warfare. Devil Master also added elements of mutant surf and gothic rock to the mix. The set was issued in March of 2019 while the band was on tour. ~ Thom Jurek