“When I first heard death metal, I was not ready for it. I didn’t understand it… I thought it was stupid!”
200 Stab Wounds vocalist-guitarist Steve Buhl is recalling the incredulity he felt as a teenager getting sandblasted by the extreme-metal genre — which he discovered through his mom’s then-boyfriend’s music library. He’d already been exposed to punk and hardcore, but the all-out menace of first-wave death metal seemed a bridge too far for the future Stab Wounds leader.
“I went into his iTunes and he had fucking Deicide, Cancer and Incantation… Crazy shit!” recalls Buhl. “I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ My brain couldn’t comprehend it at that point, because I was just into two-steps and breakdowns.”
It ended up being the classic Swedish outfits Dismember and Entombed that turned Buhl into a full-on death-metal convert. And since then, he’s gone far beyond just worshiping the genre to putting his own infectious spin on the style.
As you’d gather from a name like 200 Stab Wounds — not to mention song titles including “Skin Milk,” “Defiled Gestation” and “Release the Stench” — the Cleveland, Ohio-based foursome’s music is sopping with virulent riffage, vicious vocal heaviness and barf-bag-necessary lyricism.
Buhl’s morbid vision is paying off: Over the past few years, 200 Stab Wounds have become a high-water mark for revival-style death-metal nastiness. Everyone from genre masters (Obituary, Cannibal Corpse) and Big 4 gods (Metallica) to metal contemporaries (Code Orange, Sanguisugabogg) and the next gen of budding musicians are backing 200 Stab Wounds.
This wave of well-earned, grassroots hype has helped prop up their sophomore album, Manual Manic Procedures, as one of this year’s most anticipated extreme-metal releases. With the support of new label Metal Blade Records and a growing legion of followers — 200 Stab Wounds are primed for the next step in their gruesome evolution.
“I met a group of kids in New Jersey on this tour, and they couldn’t have been any older than 14 and were all in the same band,” recalls Buhl, on an off day during their run of spring dates with Dying Fetus and Full of Hell. “They all had Stab Wounds shirts on, and were like, ‘You guys are our favorite fucking band!’”
Buhl happens to be speaking to Revolver during a quick pitstop in Ashtabula, Ohio, the hometown where he honed his heavy craft, but moved from a year ago to live with his girlfriend in Atlanta. He has mixed feelings about the move. Ohio metal, you see, has been on a post-pandemic tear, and 200 Stab Wounds have been a key part of the Buckeye State’s great explosion of gore-fiends, which also includes Mutilation Barbecue, Inoculation and Sanguisugabogg.
The musician loves the scene, but admits that growing up 50 miles northeast of Cleveland felt like living in a cultural dead zone. “It’s a very small town,” he confirms. “There’s just not anything to do, which is part of the reason why I got into playing music.”
Buhl’s passion for music kicked off super early — and the roots of 200 Stab Wounds stretch all the way back to kindergarten, which is where he met future bassist Ezra Cook. The pair were fast friends that talked about being in a band for years; by sixth grade they were already writing original music. Later, some older kids introduced them to the local grind and hardcore groups playing at the now-defunct Ashtabula DIY spot West End. Buhl and Cook’s hardcore band, Wasted Blood, actually played the venue’s last-ever show — a mania-inducing event that included people ripping the toilets out of the floors.
Buhl eventually moved on to the thrashier outfit Cringe. But after eight years toiling in the under-ground (and a name change to Subtype Zero after New York group the Cringe — featuring cook/TV personality Rachel Ray’s husband John Cusimano on vocals — sent Buhl a cease-and-desist letter), the guitarist was ready for something different. “It just didn’t catch any traction,” he says. “So, I started Stab Wounds as a side project. I demoed the songs in my old house.”
The dive into death metal was an immediately satisfying, and appropriately gory, change of pace. 200 Stab Wounds’ 2020 demo, Piles of Festering Decomposition (later re-released via Maggot Stomp Records), was a raw-and-pulpy collection of cannibalistic carnage and caveman-ignorant slams and squeals.
The pandemic prevented them from playing to Ohio’s metal masses until early 2021, but that delay also meant the local crowd went sickhouse as soon as Stab Wounds dropped into their first song. An ensuing hype led to gigs supporting Soulfly, Cannibal Corpse and even Metallica, the latter inviting Buhl’s band out for their Texas “takeover” show ahead of the M72 tour. In the wake of 2021’s stellar full-length debut Slave to the Scalpel — an even more psychotically extreme set of serial-killer narratives — they signed with Metal Blade Records to make the new Manual Manic Procedures.
200 Stab Wounds’ sophomore album cuts much deeper into the guts of extreme music than its predecessor. It remains a violent exploration of double-kicked, death-gasmic mosh (“Gross Abuse”), but Buhl, Cook, guitarist Raymond Macdonald and drummer Owen Pooley are also tapping into angry-but-anthemic thrash (“Defiled Gestation”) and juxtaposing their otherwise relentless epics with eerie, clean-guitar arpeggiation (“Hands of Eternity”).
The band’s sonic expansion has also extended to their on-record guests. After scheduling conflicts forced Dark Funeral’s Andreas “Heljarmadr” Vingbäck to back out of his guest vocal spot on the blast-fracked “Ride the Flatline,” Code Orange’s Jami Morgan came through in the clutch with a scream-sesh about staring down a snarling pack of 200 attack dogs.
Lyricist Cook also super-sized his grisly lyrical approach, evolving from Slave to the Scalpel’s basement torture tales to the largescale attacks of Manual Manic Procedures — as heard on the explosive album-closer “Parricide.”
“It’s about someone going into a nursing home, blowing it up, and killing a bunch of old people,” Buhl explains of his bandmates’ inspiration. “Then near the end it looks at it like: Whoever did that did them a favor, because they were going to die anyways.”
Revolver asks Buhl if euthanasia-perverting pieces like “Parricide” are paradoxically pivoting 200 Stab Wounds towards a more compassionate kind of death metal — compared to the depraved in-song genital eating of, say, Scalpel’s “Phallic Filth.” He’s not so sure the differences are that cut and dry.
“There’s slasher shit on Manual Manic Procedures — just straightforward gore — but we were trying to put more thought into our lyrics,” he concedes, noting that while 200 Stab Wounds still want the violence to be front and center, songs like “Parricide” also explore gut-checking moments of remorse.
“There’s people that have killed other people, and then they go back and say, ‘That kind of sucks… Why did I do that?’ That’s the direction we took on this record, in particular.
“But then there’s stuff like that on Scalpel, too,” he continues. “On ‘Phallic Filth’ there’s the line, ‘In the sky, I see your face/I remember how sweet it tastes.’ That’s… kind of endearing?”
Twisted stuff, for sure, but it’s also safe to say that death-metal fans fully understand where the band are coming from with their incredibly gunky, over-the-top aesthetic. No doubt, they’re willing to face a few thousand more stab wounds from this Ohio crew.