Oceano

Chicago's Oceano began when guitarist Jeremy Carroll assembled the group in 2006 as a grindcore outfit. A succession of musicians passed through before the ensemble stabilized in 2007 with Andrew Mikhail on guitar, Danny Terchin behind the drums, Adam Warren handling vocals, and Kevin Colabuono on bass. From that point the quartet shaped the approach that would define their earliest recordings. Striving to expand the boundaries of extreme music while drawing from Behemoth and the Acacia Strain, they shifted toward a denser, more technically demanding strain of death metal. The adoption of the heavily detuned dropped-A tuning, carried over from one of Mikhail's earlier projects, produced a guitar tone as dense and brooding as Warren's tormented vocal delivery. Earache Records welcomed them aboard in 2008, at which point an intensive touring regimen commenced; Carroll and Colabuono exited that same year, with bassist Jason Jones stepping in. Their debut full-length, Depths, appeared on the label in 2009, followed the next year by the sophomore release Contagion. A short hiatus arrived around 2012 amid speculation of an impending breakup, yet the band resurfaced in 2013 with their third album, Incisions, delivering an even more punishing sound. Subsequent personnel adjustments brought guitarists Michael Kasper and Scott Smith into the fold along with former Monsters bassist Chris Wagner. The refreshed roster then finished a more atmospheric fourth album, Ascendants, which surfaced in spring 2015. Two years afterward they issued Revelation, their fourth full-length outing and first for Sumerian Records.