San Francisco death metal veterans AUTOPSY will release special 35th-anniversary editions of their 1991 album "Mental Funeral" on August 14 via Peaceville Records.
The reissue arrives in two formats: a vinyl edition pressed on red/green ink-spot vinyl featuring newly remastered audio, and a double-disc CD edition pairing the remastered album with a bonus commentary disc. On the latter, band members Chris Reifert, Eric Cutler and Danny Coralles walk through the writing, recording and inspirations behind each track.
The new master was handled by Greg Wilkinson, AUTOPSY's current bassist, at his Earhammer Studios. The original album was tracked at Different Fur Studios in San Francisco in late 1990 with engineer Ron Rigler, and its cover art — courtesy of illustrator Kev Walker — remains one of the most recognizable images in death metal.
"Mental Funeral" spans 12 tracks, from the sub-minute blast of album cuts to the six-minute title track, and includes staples such as "Twisted Mass Of Burnt Decay" and "In The Grip Of Winter." Since its release, the album has been consistently cited among death metal's essential records, prized for its raw, filthy production and the band's slow-fast, horror-obsessed songwriting.
AUTOPSY formed in San Francisco in 1987 and is built around the founding trio of Reifert, Cutler and Coralles, who are now approaching the band's 40th anniversary. Reifert's earlier stint as DEATH's original drummer on the "Scream Bloody Gore" sessions is often cited as a direct link between AUTOPSY's sound and death metal's earliest days. "Mental Funeral" arrived as the band's second album, following 1989's "Severed Survival," and doubled down on the slower, more grotesque tempos that would come to define the band's signature style.
Despite a mid-1990s hiatus, the band reunited in the 2010s and has remained one of the genre's most consistent acts since, continuing to release new material while its early catalog — "Mental Funeral" especially — continues to draw new generations of death metal fans back to its foundational sound.
The 35th-anniversary editions of "Mental Funeral" are out August 14 via Peaceville Records.