Boxset Review: Suffocation - Jesus Wept - The Roadrunner Years
Reviewed by Oli Gonzalez
When we think of death metal, our minds’ eye is often cast to the likes of Obituary, Morbid Angel, Deicide, and other bands who were spawned from the genre breeding ground that is Tampa Bay, Florida in the late 1980s and early 90s. And of course, there was the band who arguably started it all, Death! In the North East of the USA though, a different flavour of death metal was brewing around the same time in smaller underground venues in the city of New York. Skinless, Immolation, and Internal Bleeding were spearheading the formation of a much heavier and brutal twist on the genre. Also to emerge from this scene were one of the most influential bands of all time and the reason many extreme metal musicians are here today; Suffocation!
Over 30 years since they played their very first note, Suffocation are marking the occasion on February 27th 2026 with a look back on these earlier years and re-release of not one, not two, but three seminal albums! “Jesus Wept - The Roadrunner Years” features 26 songs from 1991’s “Effigy Of The Forgotten”, 1993’s “Breeding The Spawn”, and arguably their finest hour in 1995’s “Pierced From Within”.
So, with the band having undergone so many lineup changes over the years, perhaps we can expect some re-recordings and maybe Ricky recording his vocals and filling the shadow of the great Frank Mullen?
No.
They’re exactly the same albums from the 90s! Which is honestly a little disappointing, making it feel more like a cash grab rather than a celebration of the glory years! Or perhaps genuinely just wanting to reintroduce their work to a younger, newer audience. What can those new to Suffocation expect from this trilogy of albums? Let’s get into it.
Effigy Of The Forgotten
No fancy intros, just straight into the nastiest of blast beats and the glorious greeting of Frank Mullen’s brutal guttural vocals in ‘Liege Of Inveracity’. Come for that, stay for the jaw dropping guitar masterclass, effortlessly pumping out the most technically challenging passages that will make your fretting hand run up and down the fretboard like a rat up a drain pipe. The blistering guitar solo is perhaps the closest semblance of melody throughout the whole song! This isn’t a place for aesthetics or melody clearly. These compositional elements and song structures continue throughout the whole album, which creates a problem in of itself; how can you differentiate between the songs? When does one begin and end? Listening fatigue may not have been an issue in the early 90s but definitely is in 2026. Whilst this may have been ground breaking at the time, the genre has moved on since these primitive early days. Though the production values have clearly stood the test of time. Whereas as others in this era were pumping out poor quality recordings in a basement, Suffocation were able to construct a record that was a brutal as this but still retained some element of diction and clarity. They clearly learned their lessons from “Human Waste”.
Mike Smith didn’t play drums on Pierced From Within. That was Doug Bohn.