If I Could Kill Myself – Steeldeath
Updated: 10 hours ago
A Study in Theatrical Self-Destruction
Hello and welcome back to my self-help group titled "I like my music bloody dramatic."
Today’s session: the latest release by If I Could Kill Myself—and I do feel like the name already sets expectations rather aggressively.
It’s been a while since I last listened to the 2017 release Ballad of the Broken. The title alone had me interested, because clearly this man has never met a dramatic flourish he didn’t like. I listened to it, nodded at it, shelved it as "okay" and moved on with my life like a stable person.
Nearly ten years later, he returns with Steeldeath. And apparently, we’re not doing "okay" anymore.
As is tradition, he borrows someone else’s despair for the cover artwork—this time Wilhelm Kotarbiński "Tomb of a Suicide "(1900), because subtlety is dead and we’ve all agreed to suffer theatrically.
It’s six tracks. Half an hour.
Easily digestible.
Thirty minutes of weaponised melodrama. Perfect DSBM lullabies.
On the Subject of Sound
We start with Machinegun—that near-clear guitar picking, soft enough to almost fool you, but familiar in a way that immediately gives the game away. You’ve heard that hand before.
Machinegun, Rose Thorn Necklace.
Tomatoes, tomatos.
It feels like a seamless extension of said album—same instincts, same pull, the same way it gets under your skin before you’ve quite realised what’s happening.
The vocals, though—different.
There are barely any lyrics. There don’t need to be. What we get instead is that throaty, gasping, wet gurgling that, over time, has become almost disturbingly familiar to me. It speaks to a very specific need in me—one I’m choosing not to examine too closely. No way in hell we're unpacking that. We move.
The gurgles come hand in hand with those shrieks that never fail to make me smile, while the music opens up—wide, spacious, almost gentle—and I find myself completely, irrationally at ease inside it.
And then he does it. That thing. The guitar melody. Full of longing. Full of passion. Just the right amount of something slightly indecent lurking underneath it all. Yeah well. Bit of my catnip.
Bedrotting crashes in with a wall of blast beats, icy melodies, and that all-consuming shriekiness. It’s built less like a song and more like a space you sink into—thick with atmosphere, pulling you under, with flashes of something almost vast, almost cinematic, flickering through the noise.
Razorfeast comes galloping—drums pushing forward, heavy, insistent, giving the whole thing that stomping, breathless momentum. The vocals claw in every direction, and then—again—melody rises up, soft and devastating, just to sweep you off your feet when you weren’t looking.
Chainscars feels bleaker. Less playful. More dissonance. More pressure. The blasts hit harder, the edges feel sharper, and that familiar longing is still there—but twisted now, threaded through pounding drums and open, echoing riffs. Spaciousness and urgency sit side by side, and neither lets you breathe properly.
Fleshrust is the instrumental moment I’ve come to expect. If you’ve spent any time with Rose Thorn Necklace, you know the pattern—he likes these pauses. These little breathers tucked between the chaos.
We get waves. Engines. And over it, a piano—soft, wistful, threading its melody through with just enough dramatic weight to make it linger. It resets the stage.
Because let me not beat around the bush here—best track of the album is coming up.
Where Subtlety Finally Dies
Hypervampyre is the masterpiece.
The culmination of everything that is good on this album—and in this kind of music really.
The beginning, once again, is very familiar.
From the guitar melody leading into the scream, into the blast beats, into the godforsaken wailing.
And the keys deliver this lullaby that has you close your eyes and spin and spin and spin into—yeah, what… happiness? Frenzy? Mania? Take your pick.
The wailing, the rasping just keeps on, and when the guitar melody returns, it brings along pounding drums and harsher riffing before we slip into this ghostly piano section with dramatic synth layers and a properly pompous backdrop. He is fully committing to the dramatics here.
The tension keeps rising and rising, the song builds, the melodies are soaring, circling each other, feeding off each other. And then the wailing finally stops—with one last drawn, gaping breath—and the melody takes over. We head into beauty. And for a moment, it’s just keys. Chiming. Beady. Like droplets of rain.
But of course we don’t end here.
And I kid you not—the first time I listened to this track and hit the final section, I was laughing. Properly laughing. Head thrown back, full-on, can’t quite believe this is happening kind of joy.
Because he just goes completely overboard. We don’t end on gothic vampire softness and girls screaming. No, Sir. We fucking bring the drums back. Pounding. Like machine gun fire. And it gives the track such a perfect, dramatic ending. It’s almost industrial in its feel, and it fits so well. The wailing is back. The rasping. The track doesn’t resolve—it detonates.
Vile. Excessive. Perfect.
And at that point, I could not be happier.
Engineered Emotional Damage
What happens on this album is the staging of self-destructive impulses to perfection.
You heard me.
Staging.
Not saying the feelings aren’t real, or valid, or deeply felt—I’m not passing judgement on that.
But the way they’re lived out here, arranged into melodies and wails and bursts of release and sheer melodrama—dressed up, pushed to their most theatrical extreme—this is misery with lighting design. Washed in violet, pink, and cold blue.
Nothing here is accidental.
The atmosphere is curated. The feeling is shaped, coloured, heightened until it hits just right.
And it works.
Half an hour of dramatic mania and sociopathy.
Utterly enjoyable.