Ulcerate

Ulcerate is a New Zealand progressive death metal band that has assembled a singular discography while functioning entirely without outside support or major-industry involvement. The group surfaced in the opening years of the 2000s, taking cues from the dissonant extreme-metal style of Gorguts, Immolation, and Cryptopsy. Their sonic character was already fully realized at the outset—a churning array of jagged, atonal art-metal guitars, relentless blast beats, and guttural vocals projecting total, enveloping dread—and they have continued sharpening that approach across key releases such as Everything Is Fire (2009), Shrines of Paralysis (2016), and Stare into Death and Be Still (2020). All of their recordings have been self-produced by drummer Jamie Saint Merat at Auckland’s MCA studios, where his intentionally unrefined engineering choices have shaped the final sound.

The band was founded in Auckland in 2000 by Saint Merat and guitarist Michael Hoggard. After a period of frequent lineup changes and multiple vocalists, bassist/vocalist Paul Kelland joined as the permanent third member in time for the second album. Although the trio’s early direction was guided by the same three bands’ handling of dissonance, Ulcerate developed in the comparative seclusion of New Zealand’s extreme-metal underground. Two favorably received demos were later gathered by Deepsend Records and issued in 2006 as The Coming of Genocide. Their debut studio album, Of Fracture and Failure, appeared in 2007 on the Dutch label Neurotic Records and featured the high, piercing, hardcore-derived vocals of Ben Read, who remained only for that record; Kelland’s arrival restored a lower, more conventional death-metal vocal approach.

Steady grassroots recognition, modest touring, and a sequence of increasingly prominent label affiliations gradually raised the band’s profile. Their second album, the frequently cited genre-defining Everything Is Fire (2009), and its 2011 follow-up, The Destroyers of All, were released by the respected U.S. imprint Willowtip. Vermis (2013) and Shrines of Paralysis (2016) came out on the prominent extreme-metal label Relapse. For their sixth full-length, the visceral Stare into Death and Be Still (2020), Ulcerate moved to the French extreme label Debemur Morti.