Hammered into Collapse arrives as proof of life. The EP, led by its title track released September 24 ahead of the full two-song set on October 23, marks LENG TCH’E’s first new material since 2017’s Razorgrind, closing a gap of nearly a decade for the Belgian grindcore unit. Mixed by Taylor Young, whose recent credits include God’s Hate, Full of Hell and Vitriol, and mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege, the record plants the band inside a contemporary, physically punishing strain of US extreme metal rather than simply picking up where they left off. Two tracks, under seven minutes combined, no ceremony: a band closing distance on its own catalogue after a long and, at times, uncertain silence.
The band’s roots go back to early 2001, when drummer Sven De Caluwé, later of Aborted, founded the project in Ghent alongside guitarist Glen Herman, vocalist Isaac Roelens and bassist Kevin Loosveld, initially under the name Anal Torture. The rechristening took its cue from the historical Chinese execution method of the same name, death by a thousand cuts, a fittingly literal image for a band built on attrition and incremental brutality rather than spectacle. Grindcore was the chassis, but hardcore, death metal and looser, stoner-adjacent detours were folded in almost immediately, and the resulting hybrid earned a name of its own: razorgrind.
That name stuck fast, though the lineup did not. Death by a Thousand Cuts, released in 2002 on the Italian label Spew barely a year after the band’s formation, established the template and generated enough underground noise that Willowtip picked up ManMadePredator for US release the following year. Personnel shuffled constantly through this period, guitarists and vocalists rotating in and out, but the songwriting held its shape, and by 2005 Leng Tch’e had signed to Relapse Records for The Process of Elimination, the album that took them past cult-underground status. Hooked riffing married to some of the fastest material the band had written yet caught the attention of the wider grind and death metal circuit, earning festival slots at Furyfest, Graspop, Summer Breeze and Maryland Deathfest alongside international touring runs.
Marasmus followed in 2007, thickening the death metal end of the band’s sound. That same year brought the rupture that would define the band’s next phase: De Caluwé’s departure left the lineup without a single founding member. Rather than folding, the reconstituted band pushed forward. Hypomanic (2010) continued the work of widening the band’s musical vocabulary and kept them on the road, with stops at Hellfest, Neurotic Deathfest, Motocultor and Metalfest, but seven years then passed before Razorgrind materialized in 2017. Named for the style the band had spent over a decade refining, it was received in grind circles as a genuine return to form, arguably the strongest record the band had made since losing its original architect, and confirmation that the post-2007 lineup had fully made the sound its own.
What came after was quiet, though not empty. The band never stopped playing live, a 2026 appearance at Gullegem Metal Fest confirmed as much, but no new recorded material surfaced for nearly nine years, an absence long even by a band whose entire career has been built on patience and gaps. The lineup that emerges on the other side of that silence is Serge Kasongo on vocals, Jan Hallaert on guitar, Olivier Coppens on drums and Nicolas Malfeyt on bass and backing vocals, a unit that has now spent longer together than any prior configuration of the band.
Hammered into Collapse was recorded at Hearse Studio with engineer Lander Cluyse, built around a single escalating idea: two decades of denial giving way, all at once, to what the lyrics call cerebral hijack. Serge Kasongo’s words track a narrator who spent a lifetime avoiding a reckoning only to find it arrives anyway, swallowing and digesting the wasted time in real time. “Voided” takes the same collapse and pushes it outward, past the individual and into something closer to apocalypse, spiralling from mental unravelling to total blackout, into the void. Where the title track stays claustrophobic and internal, “Voided” opens up until the personal and the cosmic blur together.
LENG TCH’E HAVE EARNED THEIR SILENCES.
Nine years on from Razorgrind, the wait is over and the collapse has arrived.
Turn it up.
Line-up:
Serge Kasongo — Vocals
Jan Hallaert — Guitar
Olivier Coppens — Drums
Nicolas Malfeyt — Bass, Backing Vocals
Follow Leng Tch’e:
Website: https://lengtche.net/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lengtche/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lengtche.official/
X/Twitter: https://x.com/lengtche
Bandcamp: https://bandcamp.com/lengtche
Bandsintown: https://www.bandsintown.com/a/54705-leng-tch’e
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7EB2IrfvbTwc4MBfSY1Sny
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/artist/leng-tche/73629702
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/artist/5605
Tidal: https://tidal.com/artist/3889603
Available Formats:
Digital Only
