
California sludge/crust metal practitioners MORDEO, featuring within its ranks members of Amarok, Aberrance, and Level, will release their ferocious self-titled full-length debut on March 27th through a three-way collaboration with Hypaethral Records, Forever Never Ends Records, and Shove Records.
Forged in September 2023, MORDEO came together with a simple goal: to make music that is at once ugly, confrontational, and impossible to ignore. What started as a group of seasoned players looking to create something local quickly turned into a full creative fixation. Within a year, the band had written an album’s worth of material and began unleashing their punishing live set in August 2024.
Best described as noisy, aggravated, weighty crust, MORDEO’s sound is a violent collision of d-beat fury and suffocating sludge with walls of abrasive noise. Direct, deliberate, and relentlessly hostile, songs stretch out, twist through multiple sections, and make full use of dual guitars without losing the immediacy of hardcore aggression. MORDEO exists to reflect the ugliness of the present moment and turn it into something communal, loud, and impossible to tune out.
While comparisons land somewhere between a d-beat–driven Full Of Hell, the bleak crust of His Hero Is Gone, the raw drive of early Black Breath, and the oppressive weight of Primitive Man, MORDEO’s identity comes from the collision of its members’ musical backgrounds. Punk and hardcore roots grind against sludge and doom sensibilities, while death metal influences add density and force. The result is music that feels both feral and deliberate – fast when it needs to cut, slow when it needs to crush.
In advance of the record’s release, today MORDEO unleashes the opening track and lead single, “Bring Back The Fear.” Comments vocalist Brandon, “We’re tired of hearing and seeing blatantly racist and bigoted people out in the streets, announcing their hateful and backwards rhetoric. This song is about putting them in their place, and that place is away from society and very, very afraid.”
Watch MORDEO’s “Bring Back The Fear” video
Mordeo was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Chris Keene at Cutters Cathedral and features the artwork of Brian Nicolás-Espinoza.
The record will be released digitally, on limited edition CD [200 x four-panel digipak – Hypaethral exclusive] as well as vinyl in the following color variants:
Blood Red Vinyl [Hypaethral exclusive – Ltd. 100]
Brown Vinyl [Forever Never Ends exclusive – Ltd. 100]
Coke Bottle Clear Vinyl [Shove Records exclusive – Ltd.100]
Find preorders at the Hypaethral Webstore HERE, the Hypaethral Bandcamp HERE, the Shove Bandcamp HERE, and Forever Never Ends HERE.
Mordeo Track Listing:
- Bring Back The Fear
- Fight Your Friends
- The Narcissist
- No More Chances
- Interlude
- Betrayal
- Coward
- Profit for Prophets (Swamp Justice)

Photo by Julianna Rose
MORDEO:
Dave – drums
Jake – bass
Brandon – vocals, noise
Colby – guitar
Bryan – guitar
https://www.instagram.com/mordeo.time
https://www.youtube.com/@mordeo-chico
https://www.facebook.com/mordeochico/
https://linktr.ee/hypaethralrecords
https://instagram.com/hypaethralrecords
https://www.facebook.com/hypaethralrecords
https://www.instagram.com/foreverneverendsrecords
https://foreverneverends.bigcartel.com
https://foreverneverendsrecords.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/recordsshove
https://www.facebook.com/SHOVE-records
*Thanks to Earsplit PR