The Berzerker – The Reawakening
The Berzerker – The Reawakening
Apocalyptic Witchcraft
Release Date: 30/10/26 for physical release. 17/07/26 for digital release
Review by Dark Juan
Score: Graham’s Number/10
Greetings, friends! It has been a while since we last communicated, and this is entirely my fault. It turns out having a career (I didn’t really want one – it just kind of happened and I am still processing just what the fuck I did that ended up with me being responsible for stuff) is more time-consuming than I thought it would be, and the past few months have been very taxing. Nevertheless, we are talking again now and something incredibly exciting has happened. That something is the fact that (as you have read the title of this piece), The Berzerker – a bunch of absolutely terrifying Aussies led by the clearly homicidally hatstand Luke Kenny have done something I thought I would never see again and released an album. Note that I did not say a “new” album. Allow me to elucidate while I drag the Platter of Splatter ™ from its eldritch lair…
The Berzerker released “The Reawakening” on their own label (Berzerker Industries) 18 years ago. Luke had become extremely disaffected by the music world at that time and pulled the release of “The Reawakening” shortly after it had been offered to the agog and rabidly enthusiastic Dark Juan and the (probably not quite as excited) wider public. Dark Juan has been THE most enthusiastic fan of The Berzerker ever since he heard ‘Reality’ on one of those old Metal Hammer cover CDs back in the 90s. I will bore any poor fucker about the genius of The Berzerker to DEATH. Anyway, as I was a good little soldier, I was able to obtain “The Reawakening” before the release was pulled, and there is a very dog-eared copy of the CD in my cupboards upstairs. It became a cult, almost forgotten album, apart from a few purists like me having got one.
The Berzerker are one of those rarest of beasts. They were (and are, even though they have spawned an entire genre in Industrial Death Metal) unique and special, and totally unlike anything that was coming out of Australia at the traumatic time of their birth, and they are still the benchmark for brutality in music as far as Dark Juan is concerned. Distorted kick drums, velocities that defy physics and an appalling, yet disturbingly compelling coupling of Death Metal, Industrial and Gabba Techno are forcibly mated to form the last word in musical extremity. Only Manchester’s The Machinist have come close to matching the sheer, fanged and clawed, flame-spewing rage that passes for music that The Berzerker creates.
So, this album then – “The Reawakening” is just as remarkable as I remembered it. It has been a few years since I listened to it. To say it’s a tour-de-force is like saying the Tour De France is a bike race. It is the pinnacle of a band already at the height of their powers. It’s a percussive nightmare of high-calibre artillery thudding and exploding above you while you cower in a shelter carved out of mud, with absolutely no guarantee that some mad fucker isn’t going to drop a tactical nuclear device. It’s horribly claustrophobic in sound – everything presses into you, jostles you, roughs you up and grins maniacally in your face while it draws claws over arteries and veins. All you can do is stand there and hope that you survive while being utterly powerless to resist.
Fuck me, HOW I have missed this.
I’m actually a little bit jealous of the people who are going to experience The Berzerker for the first time. “The Reawakening” is the crystallisation of everything that went before – it lacks the raw edges of the debut album and “World Of Lies” and the too polished work that went into “Dissimulate” and “Animosity”. “The Reawakening” has just the right amount of oil and diesel smoke – this music was never meant to be clean. It was meant to be covered in grease and blood and sweat and mud and lubricants and smell of rage, fear and gunpowder. It’s warlike and brutal and primal and technologically advanced all at the same time – a warrior who has access to laser sights and anti-personnel weaponry and the ability to call in airstrikes who prefers to go and bite the throat out of his adversary and wants to feel the sensation of his bayonet sliding into the guts of an enemy. It has that primal edge, all wide-eyed insanity and randomly sparking synapses that explodes into violence with no warning.
Not even The Machinist comes close to making me feel what The Berzerker does.
I don’t, for the purposes of clarity, normally espouse re-releases of albums, normally viewing them as callous cash-grabs from fans. However, because Dark Juan is a progressive man, my views have come to change because of the appalling state of the music industry nowadays, and in the case of “The Reawakening”, because besides a few hundred others and myself were the only ones who got the chance to hear The Berzerker how they should always have been. It is to the credit of Luke, the boys in The Berzerker and Apocalyptic Witchcraft that they have now unleashed this masterpiece, this blueprint for world-ending extremity, this CLASSIC record for the modern world to enjoy.
Enjoy, of course, being a relative term for the absolute aural carnage that the first-time listener is going to suffer. There is not a single poor or filler track on this entire album. There is only slaughter, suffering and mayhem interspersed with learned voices calmly discussing the horrors that humans can perpetrate on each other.
I cannot overstate the importance of The Berzerker. They are the last word in brutality, in the same way that Anaal Nathrakh play Black Metal but are somehow even more extreme than Black Metal. They take Death Metal and weld dangerous stuff to it. Then use it to subjugate entire populations.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System has been dragged out of retirement and knows that Ever Metal’s Oli Gonzalez is going to take the piss out of it when it awards a score of Graham’s Number/10 for a seminal record, a record that is so hugely more than the sum of its parts that it is impossible to quantify. Brutal, yet entirely listenable. Violent, yet approachable. Scary as fuck, yet still somehow comforting.
The Berzerker will always be MY band – this is the one that still speaks to my heart. Even if Luke is fucking terrifying.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Wisdom And Corruption
02. Caught In The Crossfire
03. Disassembly Line
04. The Deception
05. Evolution Of Aggression
06. Your Final Seconds
07. Harvesting A Loved One
08. Internal Examination
09. Spare Parts
10. An Unforgotten Force
LINE-UP (2026):
Luke Kenny – Vocals/Programming
Sam Bean – Bass/Guitars/Vocals
Matt Wilcock – Guitars
Todd Hansen – Drums
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
