Heartwork

The writing began while the band were touring Necroticism. Jeff Walker has said they were after shorter songs, ones that did not wander, while adding that this did not mean they had stopped being able to write something complex — "Arbeit macht Fleisch" is his example. The album was recorded at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool between 18 May and 21 June 1993. The lyrics copied out of a medical dictionary recede and abstract writing takes their place. On the musical side, melody is grafted onto the mass of weight they already had, and the riffs carry a trace of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. That combination is where what is now called melodic death metal begins. Until Torn Arteries in 2021, this was the only Carcass album made by the same line-up as the one before it. The sleeve photographs H. R. Giger's sculpture Life Support 1993, his own reworking of a piece he made in the late 1960s. The video for the title track builds a full-size version of it with a human being welded into the structure. Earache released it in Britain in October 1993 and Columbia in the United States on 11 January 1994, which makes it the band's only major-label record. The running order here is the original's as printed.