Abhorrence honours the Great Old Ones of death metal on their new single

It is time to celebrate the birth of death! Death metal, that is.

2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the first ever death metal album, Seven Churches by Possessed. To honour 40 years of death metal, the mighty Abhorrence from Finland released a special track.

Old Age, Sickness and Death Metal is a tribute to the classics of the death metal genre. “This is our small way of respecting the heroes of our youth, and also many of our contemporaries in Scandinavia”, says Jussi Ahlroth, the band’s bass player who wrote the lyrics for the song. “This is Abhorrence saying thank you to all the great pioneers who changed our lives with their music.”

Each line of the song’s lyrics features one album of the late eighties and early nineties era of classic death metal. The song title is a reference to and a wordplay on a Buddhist teaching. Buddhism reminds us of the fact that old age, sickness and death are something none of us can escape.

Old Age, Sickness and Death Metal is also the first ever Abhorrence song to feature a video. The video concept and animation was created by Jarkko Mikkonen. The video features animated versions of covers of some of the albums mentioned on the track. Friends of the death metal genre can spot many references to old school death metal in the video.

“We dug out some old flyers and gig posters from nearly forty years ago and photographed them. Jarkko then made a recreation of what a death metal fan’s room could have looked like at that time”, the vocalist Jukka Kolehmainen says.

The cover of the digital single is a direct reference and a tribute to Possessed’s Seven Churches. The cover was made by Olli Nurminen, the guitarist of Xysma, one of the bands with whom Abhorrence often played shows together back then.

The message of Old Age, Sickness and Death Metal is, in the end, very simple, says Ahlroth.