This isn’t a compilation you put on in the background. This is a document. A long one. Ugly in places. Proud of it.
Two discs, over an hour, and you can hear the years stacking up instead of being flattened into some fake “best of” nonsense. Victims works because it doesn’t try to hide anything. Early demos sound like early demos. Later stuff sounds tighter, heavier, more controlled. Same band. Same rot. Different decades.
CD2 is where the real dirt lives.
The 1992 Festered Find demo is pure basement death metal. No polish. No mercy. Riffs feel half-carved, vocals sound like they’re fighting the mic. This is the kind of tape that got passed hand to hand, not reviewed in magazines. It’s ugly, simple, and honest. Same with Burnt from ’94 — still raw, but more focused, more violent. You can hear the band learning how to aim the knife instead of just swinging it.
Then Ideas (’97) hits, and suddenly there’s shape. Songs breathe a bit more. Still dark, still pissed, but not clueless. This is where Dehydrated stop being “demo band” and start being a band. Some tracks drag, some hit harder than others, but that’s part of the charm. This is death metal made by humans, not machines.
CD1 pulls you forward in time without pretending nothing changed.
Resurrection (2017) sounds like a band that survived. Heavier tone. Better control. Still old school, but not stuck. The riffs aren’t trying to be clever. They just work. You can hear why people welcomed this comeback instead of rolling their eyes.
The And Death Shall Have No Dominion EP carries that same weight. Kam Lee showing up doesn’t turn it into a gimmick. It just adds another layer of filth to something that was already rotting fine on its own.
Then there’s Victim (2025). Different feel. Shorter fuse. More modern edges, but still clearly Dehydrated. Some people will like it less. Some more. It fits here because it shows the band didn’t fossilize. They’re still cutting, just with different tools.
What makes Victims work is that nothing gets rewritten. No remixes. No fake continuity. You hear mistakes. You hear growth. You hear stubbornness. Thirty-plus years of death metal played by people who never chased trends and never cleaned the blood off properly.
This isn’t for newcomers looking for “the best tracks”.
This is for people who want to hear how a band actually ages in death metal — from demo rot to controlled decay.
If you’re into that, this release delivers. If not, it won’t beg you to stay.
https://www.paragonrecords.org/blogs/news/dehydrated-victims-over-30-years-of-sickness-dcd
Thanks to Grand Sounds PR.
