Interview with death metal band from Brazil - COSMOPHAGE.
Answered Matheus Alpino (guitars), thank you!
Recenze/review - COSMOPHAGE - Sidereal Malignancy (2025):
Ave COSMOPHAGE! Greetings to Brazil. I hope all is well with you. I was really looking forward to your new release "Sidereal Malignancy", already the previews sounded great. And when the EP reached me, it literally tore me apart. How did the new album come about?
Greetings Deadly Storm! This is Matheus, Cosmophage’s rhythm guitarist and we’re glad to hear that you enjoyed our debut EP.
Well, Sidereal Malignancy is the 1st release of our band and it contains all the first songs we composed. Two of the tracks were actually composed during the pandemic, before the band started its activities, and were reworked to fit the band’s style (Devourment of the Ur-Plagued and Decaying Entropy). But for Sidereal Malignancy, truth be told, there was no grand plan, these are just the songs we were able to compose as we were figuring out what we wanted to do with our music. One thing that helped is that most of us were already playing together as Utterance for a few years before starting Cosmophage so we had some experience and some solid ideas of what we wanted to do. With the pandemic we had to stop playing for two years and in those two years we ended Utterance and started Cosmophage. It was something of a new band, new style, same people deal.
I have to say that I was literally torn apart by the sound of the new album. It's dense, massive, dark and at the same time as cold as a dead man's hand. That's how I like it! The sound is by Diogo Dantas. With what feelings did you go into the studio and how did you manage to achieve such killer material?
Diogo is our vocalist and he was the latest member to join the band. After he joined, as we were tired of waiting for other people to help us record the EP, Diogo suggested he could try recording us himself (which he had already done for a previous project of his) and we accepted. The recording process went smoothly but it was crude and involved several sessions of Diogo bringing his computer to my house so me and Vinicius could track our strings. Roberto had some sessions of bringing his guitar to Diogo’s house to track his solo guitars. Then Diogo borrowed a nice mic from a friend of his to record the vocals and Manoel recorded the drums on the house of a friend of ours that owns a nice drumkit and lives close by. After that we did several sessions of mixing to achieve the final mix. At the end of the process we had twenty different mixes we had gone through as we learned to mix and what sound we wanted.
So, funnily enough, we never really went into an actual professional music studio. We recorded it all by ourselves with amateur equipment and learning as we go. We didn’t have much experience recording before, even Diogo didn’t, but we were happy with the results. I believe that in a city like Brasília that doesn’t have a lot of people qualified to record actual Death Metal, for underground niche artists like ourselves, it might be better to record and mix your music yourself then trying to explain to someone that doesn’t have experience with underground metal what Death Metal is “supposed“ to sound like. We didn’t have the technical prowess to record ourselves in the best manner but we at least had the interest to learn whatever we could to make it sound better instead of just hastily doing a generic recording sound for a paycheck which is what we would have gotten in a professional studio here in Brasília. With that being said I want to mention that it was impressive to see how much Diogo learned about recording in such a short time. The joys of youth!
I always take the recordings as a whole and you didn't just underestimate the sound but also the cover. Mariana Bergo is a great painter. How did you guys get together and how did the cover come together? Did you have any requirements or did you choose from already prepared paintings? And how did the collaboration work?
Mariana is my wife, she’s a tatto artist, illustrator and painter. She knows our band like the palm of her hand and she had already done the artwork for Utterance’s EP, Conflagration, so we knew from the get-go she was gonna be the artist for Sidereal Malignancy as well. One funny thing is that this art wasn’t made specifically for Cosmophage, this was the art she created to compete in an art contest held by Demilich. If I remember correctly they wanted to find an artwork to use for the merch of their new tour at the time. She didn’t win the contest but we won our cover art. Mariana is the best artist I know and she has my complete faith to do whatever she wants in our album covers. She knows the songs, the lyrics, and what our band is about. She’s in the process of sketching the art for our first full length album as I type this!
The lyrics are an integral part of the album. Did you choose traditional style themes like death and suffering or not? What are the lyrics on "Sidereal Malignancy" about, who is the author? Where did you get the inspiration for them?
The lyrics are written by me. Cosmophage’s lyrics are an attempt to balance the gruesome and violent nature of traditional Death Metal lyricism with esoteric/occult themes that stem from a hefty dose of cosmic horror. Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen and Ligotti and some brazilian poets like Cruz e Souza and Augusto dos Anjos are some of the main literary influences that inspire my lyrics. Nevertheless, all of our lyrics thus far, contain some sort of dimensional travel or astral projection that opens the way to a different plane of existence in which varied manners of horror and death are witnessed.
What about the concerts? How is the situation with them in Brazil at the moment? Are the clubs working? Do fans go to concerts or do they just sit in front of the internet anymore? I need a club, beer, girls!
The scene in our city, Brasília, is pretty lively at the moment. There are plenty of concerts from local bands. I’d say there are concerts to go to every weekend but there are not many Death Metal bands. Our city has a big tradition with Thrash Metal and Hardcore Punk so most of the underground concerts features these styles of music. We have done our fair share of gigs here sharing the stage most of the times with local Thrash Metal bands like Axion, Transtorno Nuclear or Evil Corpse but sometimes with other Death Metal bands like our brothers of Burial Temple. I wouldn’t say these concerts are packed with fans but most of them have a fair share of people, I’d guess the underground concerts here have usually around 100 people showing up. Enough people to play with dignity. We are hoping to see more Death Metal bands cropping up here so we can try to organize some concerts with a 100% Death Metal theme.
What about the underground scene in general? Is it alive in Brazil? You're from Brasília, it's a big city, do you meet somewhere for death metal? If I visit the city, where should I go to a gig? What about the fans? Do they support the bands?
The underground scene is always alive in Brazil. The country is big, we have a big population and a lot of big cities with a lot of metal fans. In Brasília, if you want to meet other people that enjoy Death Metal there is one bar we usually go to called Barkowski. The owner is a huge metal fan and the place is crowded with people from all walks of the underground every night, be it Black Metal fans, Death Metal fans, Thrash Metal fans, Punks and etc.
There is not one place to go to a gig that is guaranteed to be hosting an event every weekend. Since the scene here is mantained by the bands themselves and by amateur productors the places where gigs happen are constantly changing up. One thing to keep in mind is that Brasília is very big geographically speaking and the way it was urbanized is like a lot of smaller cities connected by highways and they’re mostly far away from each other. So if you make a concert in one side of Brasília, it’s usually hard to reach for the other side of the Federal District.
The fans are very supportive (we sold all our brazilian Sidereal Malignancy Cds in one day!) but I fear their numbers are slowly dwindling with the newer generations of fans being smaller. I hope to be proven wrong as I believe the underground metal scene is one of the few authentic displays of human culture that will not be replaced by some internet bullshit.
Do you have any dreams with the band? Do you have a good name in the underground, but do you want to move up? I mean, are you tempted to maybe tour with a big name, play a big festival, release another record on a well-known label? What dreams and vision does COSMOPHAGE have?
Having a Death Metal band while being from a poor country like Brazil is financially tough. It’s a lot of time we could be devoting to building ourselves financially that goes into the band so we’re not gonna deny an opportunity to make it easier on us.
We already are supremely satisfied with the label that has accepted us into their ranks (Me Saco Un Ojo) but we would definitely like to play in big festivals and to have the means to tour the world playing our music. But the core vision of COSMOPHAGE is purely related to our music: we want to play the Death Metal that we want to hear and we will not compromise on that. We’d stop playing altogether before playing a style of Death Metal that we don’t believe in.
What does death metal mean to you? Why did you choose this style? How did you get into it and what musicians were your role models when you started? Do you see metal "just" as music or is it also a lifestyle for you? Feel free to look at this page philosophically.
For me, metal is not just music. It’s more of a lifestyle for sure. But I do want to point out that the lifestyle only keeps making sense for me because I still enjoy the music a lot, the music has to be good and authentic, always, or else the lifestyle becomes false.
To me Death Metal is the best of both worlds. Death Metal is an artistical craving in the sense that it is an appropriate response to a world in which violence, death, decay and rot is the norm. But Death Metal is also my favorite genre of music. I like how complex and groovy it can get, I like how physical the experience of listening to a live Death Metal act is and most of all how brutal and dense it is. So Death Metal is both a crutch to navigate this cursed planet and a source of musical pleasure to me.
I became a metal fan when I was 9 years old and listened to Iron Maiden for the first time... from there I got into almost all styles of metal (which I fully enjoy to this day). Death Metal was the final consequence of that whole trajectory. I tend to believe Death Metal is the final frontier of that lineage of traditional metal in which Heavy Metal influenced Thrash Metal that influenced Death Metal. While Black Metal for example, in opposition to that, was an act of rebellion against traditional metal, Death Metal kept that fire burning.
(Don’t get me wrong though, I’m a huge Black Metal fan. Black Metal was my first passion even before Death Metal...)
Do you have any bands in your area that you would recommend. What do you go to see in the clubs in Brazil?
There are a lot of fun bands in the vicinity but to keep it short I’ll recommend Primitive Death, Burial Temple and Axion. These bands are from talented people that are doing their best to make quality music.
Most of us currently live far away from the usual concert venues so we unfortunately don’t go to many concerts these days. We played a lot of gigs in 2024 so sharing the stage with other bands was our main opportunity to keep updated with the other bands.
What can we look forward to from COSMOPHAGE in the coming months?
We’re in the process of writing our first full length album to be released later this year through Me Saco un Ojo and Memento Mori. Writing the new record is our only focus right now since we’re not even accepting gigs to stay focused on the record.
Thank you very much for the interview. I'm going to listen to the new "Sidereal Malignancy" again. It's great! Good luck and I hope to meet you at a gig somewhere soon and have a beer together!
Recenze/review - COSMOPHAGE - Sidereal Malignancy (2025):
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