$70.99
UPC / Barcode: 039841620863
Retail SKU: 5690563
Next To Die is Six Feet Under’s 15th studio album, released on 24 April 2026 through Metal Blade Records. It follows Killing for Revenge and was produced by Chris Barnes and Jack Owen, with Mark Lewis handling mixing and mastering. The album runs to 12 tracks and was built, by the band’s own description, around a split between faster death metal material and groovier cuts in the spirit of early Six Feet Under.
As an actual review, this is better approached as a solid, dirty, old-school-minded Six Feet Under record rather than some shocking late-career reinvention. That is also why it works. The album knows exactly what it is aiming for: blunt-force riffs, swampy groove, gore-soaked lyrics, and a sound that does not care about modern polish any more than necessary. The big surprise is not that it is ugly. It is that it feels fairly focused. For a band with such a messy reputation, focus is half the battle, and Next To Die has more of it than some people will expect. The “death and groove” split described by the band is not just promo copy either. You can hear the record moving between more aggressive, speed-driven material and slower, stomping cuts built for Chris Barnes’ lower, dragging delivery.
What helps is that Jack Owen still knows how to write riffs that sound nasty without getting cluttered. This is not technical death metal and it is not trying to impress you with complexity. It wants to lurch, hack, and grind. When the album sticks to that brief, it does well. Tracks like “Approach Your Grave,” “Destroyed Remains,” “Unmistakable Smell of Death,” and “Next to Die” look ridiculous on paper in exactly the way a Six Feet Under album should, but the best of them land because the band commit to the groove instead of overplaying. There is a sleazy confidence to this material that suits them better than trying to sound contemporary.
That said, this is still Six Feet Under, so the weaknesses are familiar too. If you already bounce off Barnes’ vocal style, this record is not going to convert you. His voice remains the whole appeal or the whole problem, depending on where you stand. The lyrics are also pure B-movie splatter trash, which is part of the charm, but it means the album has a ceiling. It is not aiming for depth, and it definitely does not have the kind of songwriting range that lifts great death metal records into another bracket. At times it feels a little one-note, and some of the more mid-paced tracks blur together more than they should. That is the cost of leaning so hard into the band’s formula.
Still, taken on its own terms, Next To Die is more enjoyable than cynical. It sounds like a veteran death metal band playing to its strengths instead of chasing relevance. There is value in that. No fake modernization, no awkward trend-hopping, no clean production trying to dress up corpse rot as prestige metal. Just riffs, filth, and a lot of enthusiasm for the grotesque. For longtime Six Feet Under listeners, that is probably enough. For everyone else, this is unlikely to change the argument around the band, but it is at least a reminder that they can still put together a record with some bite. The album is also being pushed by Metal Blade and the band as a return to both aggression and groove, which lines up with how it actually comes across.
Out of stock
Tracklisting:
