Band info
Band: Lijkschouwer
Album: ‘All What Did the Blade Reveal‘
Released: September 16th, 2025
Genre: post-black metal, sludge, death metal
Location: Netherlands
Review
Whatever they put in Dutch water not only makes people huge, it also makes them produce some seriously awesome music: Focus, Asphyx, Charlotte Wessels and Arjen Lucassen are just a few examples… and specifically in the terrain of extreme metal, every time we feature a band from the Netherlands, it’s well above and beyond the average. Today Lijkschouwer and their sophomore album, ‘All What Did the Blade Reveal‘, add another notch to that star-studded record, with six songs that combine sludge, death, black and post-metal (and even a bit of hardcore) into a rather unique thing.
There is a feeling of hope inside even the most death-influenced riffs that is hard to pinpoint, and hard to compare – the only band this reviewer knows that is even remotely similar is Terzij de Horde, one of the aforementioned awesome Dutch bands (which also released an AOTY-level album in 2025 we featured at ABMN, go listen to it!), but TdH usually sounds faster and more “desperate” while Lijkschouwer has a somewhat more “stable” cadence, for lack of better words. The band’s name means “coroner” in Dutch, and indeed, it feels like their music is a blade, opening the listener’s self to reveal their soul: the band itself says on its BC page that “we decidedly turned away from despair towards personal growth and fulfilment. We found power and hope in each other, in the connections we form with others, in uniting under a just cause and in the simple beauties in nature”.
With all of this, plus the fact that the songs deal with issues such as transphobia and the liberation of Palestine, the only thing we lament is that ‘All What Did the Blade Reveal‘ wasn’t known by us until relatively recently, and that we couldn’t help but hear it more widely worldwide, because believe us – it is THAT good!
Other links and platforms:
BC: https://lijkschouwer.bandcamp.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/lijkschouwer_official/
FB: https://s.42l.fr/UvSvEEzo