Today we’re kicking down the gates of Italy with Borys Crossburn, front-fiend of blackened thrash warriors BARBARIAN. These guys have been sharpening riffs for 16 years straight, turning heavy metal into something between a religious experience and a bar fight with a stack of old VENOM LPs. And now they’re back with a brand-new slab of chaos.
🔥 New Track: “Mercy Swallower”
Italian blackened thrashers BARBARIAN just dropped “Mercy Swallower”, the second single from their upcoming sixth album Reek of God, out January 23rd, 2026 via Dying Victims Productions. If you know BARBARIAN, you already know what to expect: raw speed, ugly beauty, riffs sharpened to 98 points of damage, and the kind of metal that smells like denim, sweat, and the inside of a cursed castle.
This record is BARBARIAN cracking open their “retrogarde metal” chapter — shorter, meaner songs, a touch of mid-’80s death metal rot, punk venom, and that signature proto-extreme filth only they can pull off. Crass references? A Hellhammer-soaked L7 cover? An Ice-T-inspired intro? Yep. This album is a museum of glorious weirdness.
Listen to BARBARIAN ‘Reek of God’ on BandCamp
🔥 ASK THE ARTIST
“What was the best advice you’ve been given in your life? Did it help?”
Borys Crossburn:
*“The best advice ever, I took from Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan says:
‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.’Later paired with MANOWAR’s:
‘Dance on a string
’Til the blood on your sword is the blood of the king.’Always works!”*
Honestly? Hard to argue with that. That’s basically the entire heavy metal constitution right there.
