Release Date May 15th, 2026
Format Vinyl, Digital
Genre Gore Metal, Hardcore Punk, Crossover
Origin United States
Exhumed is a Sacramento, California death metal band formed in 1990 by Matt Harvey. Rooted in the gore-grind tradition of Carcass and General Surgery, they have released a string of albums including “Gore Metal” (1998), “Anatomy Is Destiny” (2003), and “To The Dead” (2022), establishing themselves as one of the most consistent and uncompromising acts in American extreme metal.
Iron Reagan is a crossover thrash band formed in Richmond, Virginia in 2012, featuring members from Municipal Waste and Cannabis Corpse. Active through the mid-2010s, the band released albums including “Worse Than Dead” (2013), “The Tyranny Of Will” (2014), and “Crossover Ministry” (2017) before going on indefinite hiatus.
This repress of the 2014 Tankcrimes split gives a long out-of-print slab of mayhem another shot at daylight, and it still rips exactly as hard as it did a decade ago. Eight tracks, roughly eleven minutes of combined runtime, zero fat. The format demands economy and both bands understood the assignment without second-guessing it.
Exhumed front the split with two originals, "Gravewalker" and "Dead To The World", that pack every gram of their gore-soaked, hook-wired death-grind into under five minutes combined. The riff construction is airtight, the production punchy without being neutered, and Matt Harvey's vocal performance swings between surgical dissection and full corpse-paint hysteria. The covers of Minor Threat's "Seeing Red" and Negative Approach's "Ready To Fight" are dispatched in under two minutes total, treated like speed runs through sacred hardcore territory, respectful enough to keep the originals recognizable, violent enough to make them distinctly Exhumed. That tension alone is worth the price.
Iron Reagan's side hits differently, sloppier in the best sense, more feral, trading death metal precision for stripped-down thrash-punk aggression. "Life Beater," "Gave Up On Giving A Fuck," "Mini Lights," and "Holy Water Makes Me Wet" read like a four-point manifesto against anything overproduced or overthought. Tony Foresta's delivery is a sneering bulldozer, and the instrumentation behind him doesn't waste a second on dynamics or atmosphere it doesn't need. This is Crossover 101 executed by people who've clearly lived in the genre's gutter.
The pairing of Exhumed and Iron Reagan wasn't accidental in 2014 and it isn't coincidental now, these two camps share a common DNA rooted in hardcore's intensity with metal's extremity amplifying it. The split doesn't pretend the gap between them doesn't exist; it exploits it. The gear-shift between sides is jarring in a way that keeps the whole thing alive across repeated plays.
|8.0
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