As has already been established in this very publication, Cattle Decapitation is the furiously-misanthropic, environmentally-conscious, and stunningly-virtuosic tech-death/grindcore band of choice for the cultured, discriminating metalhead. They have eight studio albums and a reputation for outdoing themselves every single time. In other words, it would be totally legitimate for a ranking of their discography to be perfectly chronological. We’re not going to do that, but we are going to come close…
8. To Serve Man (2002)
Despite the cool “Twilight Zone” reference in the title, the band’s debut full-length is easily dead last. It’s meat-and-potatoes grindcore that likely would have been consigned to the dustbin of extreme music if Cattle Decapitation hadn’t gone on to evolve as dramatically as they did. “To Serve Man” is not a pleasant listen; the songs are gross, both conceptually and aurally, and the production makes early Carcass sound nuanced. But as a counterpoint to their more recent work, it’s a nice reminder that even a band with song titles like “Testicular Manslaughter” can grow and refine their craft.
Play it Again: Actually, “Testicular Manslaughter” is pretty good
Skip It: The second half of the album. Nothing new is going to happen.
7. Humanure (2004)
Cattle Decapitation is well known, especially in their earlier work, for having a gift for puns and wordplay, but surely they’ll never top this album title. They were, in this era, truly the Oscar Wilde of deathgrind. Musically, this is a huge improvement over “To Serve Man.” The songwriting is more dynamic and you can already hear a glimmer of the proggy/techy death metal that they’ll fully embrace later in their career. The title track has some riffs you could easily mistake for early Morbid Angel. And the production is light-years better. But let’s be honest, the cover art is always going to be the most memorable thing about this one. There’s gross, there’s REALLY gross, and there’s this.
Play it Again: “Humanure”; “Applied Human Defragmentation”
Skip It: “Scatology Domine” – It’s a cool idea for an extreme metal band to cover Beethoven while nodding to Pink Floyd, but also, meh.
6. Karma Bloody Karma (2006)
Bear with me here: This album is Cattle Decapitation’s “Rubber Soul.” It’s a crucial pivot for a band that wants to reinvent itself but isn’t QUITE sure how to do it yet. There are still some nasty grindcore moments, but their sound is drastically evolving here, with the tech-death elements slowly but surely taking shape. This is also where the band starts to get serious about their socio-political stances, and the relative lack of gross-out song titles suggests a more earnest sense of purpose that’s reflected in the ferocity of (most of) the music.
Play it Again: “Suspended in Coprolite”
Skip It: “One Thousand Times Decapitation”
5. The Harvest Floor (2009)
Why stop the analogy now? This album is Cattle Decapitation’s “Revolver.” It’s the beginning of a sustained period of prolific and absolutely ass-kicking output from a band that suddenly seems entirely confident in its artistic identity. And the album art is harrowing as hell. While most of their covers (all of them done by the legendary Wes Benscoter) are gross in a cartoonish, Cannibal Corpse kind of way, this one is just flat-out grim, and a logical continuation of the relatively cheesy “Karma Bloody Karma” cover (that’s totally a cow in the prison guard uniform; we will fight you about this). We’re only at #5, but we’ve already reached the point where you could put this and the remaining albums in any order and it would be perfectly respectable. We wouldn’t even blink if someone said Harvest Floor was their #1. It’s brilliant.
Play it Again: “We are Horrible People”; “Regret and the Grave”
Skip It: Listen to it all
4. The Anthropocene Extinction (2015)
At last, we deviate from chronological order! For almost any other band in this genre, “Anthropocene” would probably be considered a magnum opus. Cattle Decapitation has so many great albums that it’s only barely in the top half of the ranking. This album has a bit more emphasis on melody than a lot of the discography, but that doesn’t make it any less ferocious. A lot of people will say it sounds like they’re trying to recreate its predecessor (see #2), but there are far worse albums a band could try to recreate. We are, however, docking one point for the presence of Phil Anselmo. Yeah yeah, Pantera was a Very Important Band in the ’90s. But still, ugh. All that said, this too is a brilliant album.
Play it Again: “Manufactured Extinct”; “Pacific Grim”
Skip it: “The Prophets of Loss” (see above)
3. Terrasite (2023)
So intense. So heavy. So brutal. So well-written. Such an intriguing narrative concept. Such an immaculate production job. Such superhuman speed from Dave McGraw’s peerless drumwork. Such offputting album art. And SO much critical consensus. Every reviewer out there pretty much tripped over themselves to heap praise on this thing. It showed up on literally every single year-end list we checked out, and we are music obsessives who love a good subjectively determined hierarchy, so we checked out quite a few. This album proves that Cattle Decapitation just doesn’t miss. When they put out an album, you can count on it being a banger. And it’s still only #3…
Play it Again: “Terrasitic Adaptation”; “We Eat Our Young”; “Just Another Body”
Skip It: Just listen to the whole album
2. Monolith of Inhumanity (2012)
OK, so this is their “Sgt. Pepper.” Yep, the analogy is still going. It’s a front-to-back stunning record, with a fully-formed narrative concept that will continue through the next several releases. Travis Ryan’s vocal stylings, which were always noteworthy, hit a new and jaw-dropping peak, something that will also continue through the next several releases. The band’s socio-political rage only gets more intense from here, and the music that it’s channeled through on “Monolith” will floor you, plain and simple. It’s the kind of album you wish you could go back and listen to for the first time again.
Play it Again: Yes, do that.
Skip It: Nothing
1. Death Atlas (2019)
You can smell the hatred for humanity’s innate badness emanating off of this album from the moment you drop the needle. It’s a relentless indictment of the irreversible damage we’ve done to the earth, to each other, and to ourselves. Previous albums seemed to have an inkling (like, a REALLY REMOTE inkling, but still an inkling) of hope that maybe we could set things right. But the DNA of “Death Atlas” is all fire and brimstone, apocalypse and obliteration. That they were able to follow this album up at all, much less with the excellent “Terrasite,” is a testament to the band’s creativity. This is a concept album in the purest sense, a multi-modal account of everything going to hell, with some of the most punishing and precise death metal you’ll ever hear. Far from seeming to pad out the runtime, the spoken word and ambient passages provide a grim backdrop of global calamity that gels perfectly with the music. If there were ever an extreme metal album that ought to be regarded as a complete and unified work of art, it’s this.
Play it Again: All of it, but if you’re spinning it more than three times a week, be sure to discuss that with your therapist.
Skip It: Don’t you dare