CATTLE DECAPITATION: Entire 'The Anthropocene Extinction' Album Available For Streaming

“The Anthropocene Extinction”, the new album from San Diego-based deathgrind masters CATTLE DECAPITATION, can be streamed in its entirety using the SoundCloud widget below. Due on August 7 via Metal Blade, the CD was once again helmed by Dave Otero (ALLEGAEON, CEPHALIC CARNAGE), who worked on 2012’s “Monolith Of Inhumanity”.

“Dave is a bonafide producer,” says CATTLE DECAPITATION vocalist Travis Ryan. “He’s got a lot of great ideas and this time we heard him out pretty religiously because making ‘Monolith’ had worked out so well. We’ve always kind of co-produced our records with whoever we brought in, but these last two we did a lot more listening to what he had to say rather than just sticking with what we were saying. Sometimes we shot down his ideas and vice versa, but that discussion was always beneficial. He basically becomes the fifth member of the band at that point, and I think that kind of relationship is the best way to get anything out of anybody.”

CATTLE DECAPITATION also enlisted a surprising array of guests to help achieve their vision. The one and only legendary Philip H. Anselmo lends his throat to “The Prophets Of Loss” while recent signee to his Housecore Records label, fellow San Diegan and friend of the band, AUTHOR & PUNISHER, brings forth the industrial damnation as an intro to the track “Plagueborne”. Additionally, Germany’s dark metal misanthrope, Mr. Jurgen Bartsch of the almighty BETHLEHEM, lends a spoken-word piece in his native tongue to the apocalyptic final track “Pacific Grim”.

The record also sees the band extending their collaboration with illustrator Wes Benscoter, who’s handled the artwork for every CATTLE DECAPITATION release since 2002’s “To Serve Man”.

“When we work with Wes, he becomes a member of the band,” says Ryan. As always, Benscoter formulated striking imagery that conveyed the record’s themes in unflinching style, the cover featuring a bloated and distorted corpse washed up on a beach, its torn abdomen disgorging a mass of waste plastic.

Whereas “Monolith Of Inhumanity” dealt with what could become of the earth and its life forms had humans continued their present course, with “The Anthropocene Extinction” we have been transported forward to man’s last gasps, reminiscent of what is currently going on with the Laysan Albatrosses on the island of Midway Atoll. The birds and aquatic wildlife of the Pacific Ocean are mistaking the vast amounts of man-made plastic items for food, ingesting it and are dying in large numbers, rotting where they fall and exposing to the world what is happening to the ecosystems of the earth’s oceans — the most unknown and unexplored part of our planet. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch of the North Pacific Gyre is just part of the problem — there are five gyres on planet earth and they’re all filling with plastic waste outnumbering the plankton vital for the ocean’s ecosystems. The breakdown of the earth’s ecosystems has begun long ago due to human interaction as well as the domino effect that will surely seal the fate for our species: The Anthropocene Extinction.

“The Anthropocene Extinction” track listing:

01. Manufactured Extinct
02. The Prophets of Loss
03. Plagueborne
04. Clandestine Ways (Krokodil Rot)
05. Circo Inhumanitas
06. The Burden Of Seven Billion
07. Mammals In Babylon
08. Mutual Assured Destruction
09. Not Suitable For Life
10. Apex Blasphemy
11. Ave Exitium
12. Pacific Grim