“When things change, I always embrace it. Change is what makes life interesting. If it’s all the same, nothing happens. But when everything turns upside down, you have to figure out how do everything a different way. Making music in these times is kind of liberating, you know? I know how soon things could end, so now I really don’t give a fuck.” (A. Odden, 2023)

Over 30 years into their nefarious saga, Cadaver remain one of the most unique and potent forces in contemporary heaviness. Formed in Norway in 1988 and led by founding vocalist/guitarist Anders Odden, they pioneered a strange and terrifying strain of death metal that proudly ignored the rulebook. Showcased on seminal debut Hallucinating Anxiety and its sophisticated follow-up, …In Pains (1992), their commitment to a subversive ethos set them apart from the vast majority of like-minded bands.

In 2023, Cadaver are back once again to raise a scabby middle digit to the very notion of metal conformity. After a turbulent few years, during which he fought and won a battle with cancer, Odden and his drumming comrade Dirk Verbeuren have concocted a deranged and venomous follow-up to 2020’s widely acclaimed Edder & Bile. Both true to the band’s primitive roots and an audacious, ground-breaking, psychedelic horror-show, The Age Of The Offended is an angry, fucked up album for angry, fucked up times, defiantly created against the odds.

“The pandemic didn’t slow us down at all,” says Odden. “After my health problems, I was fighting my way back, and then when I was fit enough to gather material and hack out the songs together with Dirk, this time it really went fast. I’m always making demos and half songs, and Dirk also came in with one full song, which I /cadaverized/! I wanted to do something different, that had what felt like the sound of the times, that apocalyptic feeling of lockdowns and everything. But I also wanted it to be timeless, in a way, and different from everything. I really wanted to accomplish something more than just another death metal album. I think Edder & Bile is pretty much how I wanted it, but this time I wanted to expand my sound more. We always go further. We don’t settle for just one thing, you know?”

Despite all the logistical challenges thrown up by a global pandemic, the strength and focus of Odden’s musical vision was never going to be thwarted. Recorded in Norway, Finland and LA, The Age Of The Offended represents yet another triumph over adversity for these enduring diehards. 

“Dirk recorded his drums in LA. Our producer, Adair Daufembach, who did all the drums for Dirk, he came to Finland to record with (Megadeth guitarist) Kiko for his solo album, and then he was meant to come to my place and record whatever I was doing,” Odden recalls. “This was late 2021, and the Covid passport thing wasn’t working for Americans to go from Finland to Norway, so I had to fly to Finland. We had an Air B&B house, I set up a temporary studio and I borrowed some equipment from a producer friend of mine in Helsinki, and we recorded all of my parts, over two weeks in Helsinki, right next to the airport. To make the situation a little more humorous, I gave the place name – La Villa Necro!”

Cadaver’s catalogue is a strange and varied thing. From the primal death metal experiments of the early years, to the prescient tech-terrorism of 2001’s Discipline (released under the name Cadaver Inc) and the spiteful back-to-basics onslaught of 2004’s Necrosis, Odden has never walked a predictable path, but even by his own exacting, esoteric stands, The Age Of The Offended is a real revelation. Rooted in old school death metal but deliciously warped, with countless lysergic embellishments and moments of disorientating madness, songs like explosive opener Postapocalyptic Grinding and the pummelling bad trip of Death Revealed add yet more depth and colour to the Cadaver landscape.

“I really wanted it to be totally psychedelic. It’s a very weed-friendly album! It will be really scary on mushrooms, I think. But you can hear the signature sound in all the albums somehow, in the riffs. You can recognise the same vibe, but it’s always in a different sound context and inspired by different things. I don’t want to limit myself as a songwriter and as a musician.”

Trigger warning: The Age Of The Offended is not for the overly sensitive. As a veteran of the Norwegian scene, Anders Odden remembers a time before smartphones and social media. Audibly disgusted by the state of things today, the new Cadaver album offers a reminder that the metal underground was created by people that rejected orthodoxy and refused to compromise. Today, the world is more concerned with not pissing people off, which runs distinctly against Cadaver’s core philosophy.

“When we were growing up, we wanted to offend /everybody/ with what we were doing,” he states. “That’s what I learned from Mayhem. Just say ‘fuck off’ to everybody and be explicit and obnoxious and all that stuff. But now everybody is so thin-skinned, and it’s very provoking for my generation, that we can’t say what we want to say. People are just wimps and pussies, instead of standing up for themselves and saying ‘fuck you’ to people. I hate social media. I’m not interested at all. I have a life. I’m really old school. If you don’t text me, I don’t know you. But the old ways were pretty fucked up too, ha ha ha!”

Aside from the inestimable skills of drummer Dirk Verbeuren, Odden is joined on The Age Of The Offended by some extremely notable figures. Firstly, Norwegian metal legend Ronni Le Tekrø, guitarist with old school heroes TNT, can be heard shredding like a madman all over the album. Originally brought in to play a solo on Cadaver’s twisted reworking of TNT classic Deadly Metal (also, incidentally, the name of Odden’s first band), Ronni subsequently enjoyed the experience so much that he offered to perform on the whole record. Meanwhile, double-bass maestro Eilert Solstad, who performed on ….In Pains in 1992, returns to the Cadaver fold on the murderous Scum Of The Earth, adding scabrous textures and subterranean tones to Odden’s cudgelling storm of riffs.

“Eilert is a very skilled musician, he comes from punk and jazz originally, but to him Cadaver sounds like upbeat, strange, progressive insanity with lots of punk vibes and weirdness,” Odden notes. “He grew up with Sabbath and all the great bands of the ‘70s, so he’s hardcore old school. He’s been with us since 2020, and when we do the live show as a trio, it's insane how much space it leaves for the guitars to be totally strange on top. The double bass with distortion just fills out all the holes in the low end, and it sounds very different from any other metal band. That’s a key thing for us, to do something deliberately different live.”

Finally, The Age Of The Offended offers more proof that Cadaver are a wholly singular force. With purposeful echoes of the strange, woozy intro he recorded for Hallucinating Anxiety, 33 years ago, trombone player Svein Johannessen has once again joined forces with Odden to create the new album’s unsettling starting point, The Sycophanto Swing…

“Svein was in Eilert’s jazz-punk band back in the early days. I just wanted to bring him back. He’s playing a melody on top of what I wrote, and it sounds like I sampled something from the 1920s. It’s an original piece, but it sounds like it’s from a hundred years ago. I wanted that feeling of 100 years ago, with Spanish Flu and the First World War, that apocalyptic feeling. I wanted to have the roaring twenties’ sound woven into this really weird, modern cinematic piece. I called it the Sycophanto Swing, because of all these sycophants, sucking up to these idiots that run the world, whether it’s Trump or Putin or whoever the favoured dictator is!”

Following up the grotesque rebirth of Edder & Bile was never going to be easy, but The Age Of The Offended confirms that Cadaver are on a roll and growing in strength and confidence. A wild and wicked barrage of hallucinatory brutality, it strikes a blow for originality, curiosity and defiance, in a world transfixed by the utterly mundane. Right now, as ever, nothing and no one else sounds remotely like them.

“When we grew up, we didn’t just listen to one kind of music, it was whatever was extreme,” Odden concludes. “Hardcore, death metal, black metal, grindcore, it didn’t matter. I think all these people who try to fit into a genre, they don’t understand that we never wanted to be part of any genre. That was our driving force - to do  our own fucked up version of whatever suited our abilities, and if that was named black metal, death metal or grindcore, who the fuck cares?”