Le Mars

Le Mars operates out of São Paulo, the megacity whose extreme metal lineage is impossible to summarize without invoking the canonical names that built Brazilian death metal and grindcore from the ground up: Rot, the long-running grind veterans whose splits with Napalm Death and Patareni helped put São Paulo on the international grind map; Krisiun and Rebaelliun in the death metal sphere; and a deep substratum of crust, powerviolence, and goregrind acts catalogued in Decibel Magazine's 2018 Grinding Around the World feature on Brazil. Le Mars belongs to that crossover tradition, working the seam where death metal's structural riffing meets grindcore's blast-and-burn brevity, with hints of deathcore's rhythmic chug pulling at the edges. Their 2013 release Inner Me (Enemy) collects seven tracks of dense, percussive material that sits closer to the death/grind hybrid pioneered by Sweden's Nasum and the US Terrorizer-Pig Destroyer lineage than to pure goregrind, the vocals trading between guttural lows and lacerating highs while the rhythm section navigates whiplash tempo shifts. São Paulo's grind underground has historically been one of the most active in the southern hemisphere, sustained by a dense network of small venues, fanzine culture, and split releases on labels like Cogumelo (the Belo Horizonte institution that released Sepultura's Bestial Devastation and Sarcófago's I.N.R.I.) and dozens of smaller paulistano imprints. Le Mars contributes to that ongoing conversation, a band whose available output suggests members steeped equally in the international canon of extreme music and the specific Brazilian inflection of brutality that has shaped the country's underground since the mid-1980s.