Exumer came out of Germany in the great thrash-metal explosion of the 1980s, when the guitars were fast, the hair was ridiculous and everybody seemed to believe that the world might actually end before the next rehearsal. Four decades later, they have released Death Mask Messiah, their sixth album, and the good news is that they haven’t come back to play museum pieces.
They’ve come back angry. And anger, when properly maintained, is a truly beautiful thing.
Death Mask Messiah is the first Exumer album since 2019’s Hostile Defiance, and the delay seems to have done them no harm. The band has never been interested in producing albums simply because the calendar says it is time. The songs were developed over several years, from 2021 through 2025, with the pandemic, lineup changes and ordinary human disasters getting in the way. The result is a record that feels less like a product and more like something that has survived a fight.
The title track gets things started with exactly the kind of riff that makes you wonder whether your neighbours have ever really deserved peace and quiet. “Death Mask Messiah” is about David Koresh and the infamous Waco siege, but Exumer use that story as a doorway into something broader: false prophets, manufactured belief, misinformation and the old human habit of following charismatic lunatics straight toward the cliff.
It’s a good subject for thrash metal because thrash has always been at its best when it looks at the machinery of stupidity and asks who built the damn thing.
“Blinding Skies” keeps the pressure on, while “Sin Bleeder” is a particularly good example of Exumer knowing when to stop being clever. The song apparently began with complicated rhythmic ideas, odd time signatures and enough accent changes to make the musicians question their life choices. They simplified it into something direct and vicious. The result is better for it: three minutes of pure forward motion.
Then comes “Eradication”, one of the album’s real killers. Marc Bräutigam described it as an atypical Exumer song, and that difference is precisely what makes it work. It has the aggression you expect but pushes the band’s vocabulary somewhere slightly stranger. If you’re making a playlist called Tracks That Make The Furniture Shake, put this one near the beginning.
“Ravishing Waste” and “Frozen Ground” are especially interesting because they mark the first time Bräutigam has taken primary songwriting credit on Exumer songs. He joined the band back in 2013, but these two tracks represent a new step in his contribution. “Frozen Ground”, in particular, is the longest Exumer composition on the record and gives the album one of its more substantial final blows.
“Allocated Savagery” returns to the Waco concept, while “Serpent” and “Fratricide” continue the record’s fascination with deception, division and people persuading other people that their neighbours are the enemy. This is not subtle political songwriting. It isn’t supposed to be. Exumer are making thrash metal, not applying for a grant to investigate nuance.
And that’s part of the charm.
There is also “Unchained Angel”, a cover of Nasty Savage, with Nasty Ronnie himself appearing on vocals. It is the album’s one conspicuous backward glance, but it doesn’t feel like an old photograph dragged out to prove everyone was young once. It sounds like Exumer paying a debt to the underground that helped create them.
Death Mask Messiah is old-school thrash played by musicians who have lived long enough to know that the past wasn’t necessarily better. It is faster in places, nastier in others, more controlled than the band’s youthful work, but still recognisably Exumer. The band isn’t trying to recreate 1986. They’re dragging 1986 into 2026, kicking and screaming, and making it pay rent. The real achievement though is the consistency: eleven songs, no fat, and a production that lets the violence breathe.
This album is not merely a respectable late-career thrash record. It is evidence that Exumer still have a legitimate place in the genre they helped build: not as relics, but as veteran German thrashers who can still walk into the room, plug in, and make the furniture nervous.
That’s a damn fine legacy.
Donnie’s Rating: 9/10
Death Mask Messiah is out now via Metal Blade Records.
