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Toxic Ruin were a band that caught me by surprise a few years back with their debut, Subterranean Terror, which managed the tough balancing act of making old-school as fuck Thrash that stood out from the rest with strong musicianship and songwriting. In the five years it took to release their sophomore effort, Nightmare Eclipse, the band got themselves signed to M-Theory Audio and lost their vocalist Chubzy McDuff and guitarist Mike Hasselman. This has caused an unsurprising change in musical direction, one that moves away from the Bay Area sound and into the more technical and brutal shores of Florida with a sound more akin to Atheist, Solstice, and later Death. Part of this is due to bassist Stephen Behrendt taking over vocal duties, as his style is much more vicious than Chubzy's, and it seems the band went along with it and made the music angrier and heavier. Thankfully, this change in style didn't change the quality of the music, which is still dedicated to thrashing your face off like the bad old days with rich songwriting, killer riffs, and well-done solos. Most of the songs are like the savage "Voices of Death" and hit you in the face like a spiked brick, but it's the instrumental "It of the Horrid Storm" that really shows off just how advanced the songwriting and musicianship of this band really are compared to their peers, especially with the delicious solos it contains. This is certainly a different animal from the debut, but it's less like listening to a different band and more like Toxic Ruin exploring different facets of their sound to keep themselves fresh, and if they can keep killing it as hard as they have here and on the debut, then I expect great things from them in the future.