Defaced - Icon

Angry Metal Guy

It’s heartening to see Par Olofsson getting work in the age of cheap generative AI. In retrospect, his purple, shining renderings of cityscape kaijou vortex gore, now a visual synonym for modern death metal, share a looseness and repetition of detail that’s strikingly reminiscent of midjourney products. It would be all too easy to ask the computer to ape, though you’d lose the structural, communicative logic that comes from putting a sandwich-powered Swede¹ rather than a gas-powered server farm behind the brush. Icon, the third record from Switzerland’s Defaced, comes wrapped up in a characteristically Olofsson-ey work and, much like the cover, is decidedly human, if a bit unambitious. Defaced have re-emerged more than a decade for good reason; a record’s worth of carefully-crafted death metal.

Defaced operate in the style of bands like Abysmal Dawn or Throne of Heresy, unabashedly ornamenting their death metal with splashes of black metal and melodeath and foregoing flashy playing and stylized production. “The Antagonist” opens Icon at full speed, demonstrating Defaced’s strengths. After a bit of string bending, the song’s low, tremolo-picked theme kicks in, and the band trades between this riff and a few others for the rest of the song, adding a new flourish each time. A secondary melody here gets a few variations, first staccato, then subdued to back a solo, then broadly chugged with a subtle pinch harmonic tag at the end, then chugged again with a big rest after the first phrase for a bit of ornamentation. Guitarists Matze Schiemann and Marco Kessi don’t pull out show-stopping riffs but play around plenty with what they do put forth and transition very smoothly between variations, ones that usually give the rhythm section (drummer Massimiliano Malvassora and bassist Michael Gertsch) some room to show off. The other Gertsch (gruff-voiced Thomas) gets a few nice cut-outs as well, with the more melodic, black-metal-influenced “The Initiation” letting his burly roars and hoarse croaks ring out above the other instruments, frequently multi-tracked. The Gertsches even get themselves a little bass/barker duet before the bouncy pit riff of “Culling the Herd” kicks in.

Icon is expertly paced and organized. Mid-album duo of “Anthem of Vermin” and “Sonate” shakes expectations just as things seem to get static, the former ending in trem-picked triumph before transitioning to the latter, an acoustic guitar piece that a half-dozen Gothenburgers would have been proud to write to tape years ago. In both pieces, Defaced practice the same shrewd and thoughtful songwriting found across the album; neither follows a predictable path, but each new idea flows from the last seemingly without effort or thought.

Yet Icon lacks the punch to compel listening. The band plays expertly with their compositions and, at small scales, demonstrates a playfulness and creativity that’s often missing from death metal. But somewhere in the middle detail–the riffs and melodies themselves–things are a bit gray. Defaced’s last effort—the decade-old Forging the Sanctuary—suffered similarly, though it had a bit more ambition. Icon plays death metal well but plays it safely, carefully welding riffs together and sanding the joints smooth into something very strong and very cube-shaped.

The more closely I listen to Icon, the more I appreciate Defaced’s obvious skill; it’s more than a competent record, with watertight songs that wring their riffs pretty dry without ever getting tedious. But those riffs just aren’t very exciting, and this middle-of-the-road modern death metal style really needs spectacle to excel, like the catchy choruses and wild Death-isms of Abysmal Dawn. Icon doesn’t offer listeners excitement, but there’s room in it for plenty of contentment. If you like your death metal well-played and without the fuss, Icon is your cup of tea.²



Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 192 kbps MP3
Label: Massacre Records
Websites: facebook.com/defacedswiss
Releases Worldwide: January 30th, 2026

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