Album Review : Snuffed on Sight - Promo 2020 (2020)

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Don’t let your local radio DJ fool you: record sales might be slipping, labels might be hurting but music is in a great place, right now. Never before, creators have felt so empowered to just put music in the world without ever having to compromise. Sure, the marketplace is jammed with talented people. But the quality of your music is now the most important factor in getting noticed. Snuffed on Sight started releasing its filthy slam music last summer and it’s already traveling. All it took was one demo and utter brutality.

What is Snuffed on Sight exactly and what is it so goddamn interesting? Well, it’s a really successful and homogenous blend of New York hardcore, deathcore and slamming brutal death metal. You might not think these genre do together, but they really do. Slippin’ and Outside Dog, the two songs on Promo 2020, are nothing complicated or revolutionary: chugging riffs, breakdowns, gurgling vocals and occasional angry, clean rants. But what they do is bring together the best of three different worlds.

Promo 2020 is a celebration of brutality. Both of the sonic and lyrical kind. There’s little known on Snuffed on Sight, but it seems to be a one man project dedicated to purging and celebrating inner violence. You could think of it as Dying Fetus meets King 810, I guess? I find it incredibly liberating that people still make angry, monstrous music in 2021. Because there is nothing wrong with anger and inner violence if you have an outlet to live it without hurting anyone, right? This is why artistic expression exists.

Another thing that Snuffed on Sight inherently represents is the stupidity of overlabeling genres in brutal music. For example, if you’re a black metal musician your fans won’t ever allow you to incorporate influences from… let’s say thrash metal and industrial music in your work. It would be considered selling out. Blending New York hardcore and brutal death metal right off the bat is a giant "fuck you” to this idiotic and reductive mentality. Snuffed on Sight is lean, mean and oddly unpredictable.

The only reason why I know Snuffed on Sight is because Finn McKenty mentioned it in the “favorite music” section of his 2020 wrap-up episode of The Punk Rock MBA. Good ol’ word-to-mouth. A talented and somewhat visionary musician put out the nichest of the niche music online and it travels on sheer quality alone. It found me just as well as the new Shawn Mendes album who is promoted on the back of buses in Montreal. But I choose to talk about one and not the other. Music is doing just fine. It’s just changing.

7.7/10