Blackrout – Erotic Warfare

“From Germany’s Ruhr-region comes Blackrout, a completely new, fresh band made up of a bunch of young, inexperienced twenty-somethings with a new, adventurous take on extreme metal!” That was pretty much my exact thoughts when I first listened to this album. I imagined a group of late-teens who’d gone in the studio for the first time and recorded an imperfect bomb. Imagine my surprise when I found out that even the youngest one must be at least my own age, and there’s not even a studio involved. This is isn’t even this band’s debut! Ah, the confusion needs unpacking.

Blackrout dates back to 2008, they released their first EP in 2009, and their debut album in 2015. Then people left, got replaced, came back and so on. Blackrout wrote the majority of the songs for Erotic Warfare, then COVID hit. Then more lineup-changes as life kept carrying on being a dick.

Erotic Warfare didn’t get released, it sort of just sat there. Until Benny the bassist returned in 2022, joined by new guitarist Jan, drummer Maik and founding guitarist and now vocalist Ouzi. The band was ready, the songs were written, and now, the recordings could be done. Fuck the studios and big wigs, these Germans went at it on their own and are self-releasing Erotic Warfare on the 1^st of May 2026.

And that bit is important: self-release. Because this album is raw, gritty and imperfect. There are several moments where a professional producer would have stepped in and stopped the madness, but that might have been detrimental to this particular effort.

Erotic Warfare opens hard and heavy with “Vulvareign”. It’s a silly name for a silly-named album, but for the most part, this functions as a solid, chaotic, Black Metal-inspired thrash feast. I don’t have an issue with the over-the-top lyrics and imaging, but I do have a problem with the vocalist suddenly shouting the words “24/7!!!” roughly halfway through the song. Atmospheric and chaotic extreme metal is what this is, and those types of phrases pull us out of the icy magic and makes us remember that we live in a social media world.

But, oh well. I can live with it because the music is of very high quality. “Gods of Gomorrah” introduces a healthy dose of Crossover to the Extreme Metal mix – I personally get a lot of Municipal Waste here and I’m loving it. The first few tracks are very decent, but it’s all cranked up a notch by song number four, “Mephista”.

“Mephista” is balls-to-the-wall metal and the band finally introduces one of their most obvious influences: Machine Head. This becomes an industrial dream; gritty, groovy, disgusting and fucking awesome! And Ouzi’s vocals completely steal the show. This is hard, rough, dark and furious. It is by no means polished, thanks to the lack of a studio, but that only makes this album that much more impressive. It’s not technically refined, but it’s real. It thoroughly carries the DIY ethos of Black Metal and Punk.

And from here, there’s no let up. “Sexorcism” is proggy and almost off-beat in a fantastic way, whilst the three closing numbers are all chaotic, extreme and full of personality. There’s so many influences and elements at play throughout Erotic Warfare, yet they are all easily definable: Machine Head, Sepultura, Slayer, Gojira and so on. These are the bands that Blackrout claim to be influenced by, so they clearly understand their own music, but there’s also murkier, less classic Thrash-elements at play here.

This album is gritty and dirty, but it’s never unfocused or chaotic in an uncontrolled way. Blackrout know exactly what they’re doing and they have the stones to do it on their own, which is incredibly impressive. Erotic Warfare would be a commercial success with better production and “proper” oversight, but it would definitely lose its soul. This is a completely uncompromising effort, and it’s a breath of fresh air. It is Metal the way it’s meant to be. We desperately need more bands like Blackrout and you need to let Erotic Warfare tear you a new one. You won’t regret it.

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