Why ANTHROPOMANCY's Demo 1993 Deserves Cult Status In Early '90s Death-Doom

Are you a giant death metal nerd? Then you need to hear this very obscure demo from a great death metal band that never really got the recognition that they deserve… and then check out my full series on exactly this topic right here.

I am a little baffled that Anthropomancy and their 1993 demo doesn't have more of a cult following or at least that the name hasn't come up in the conversation of early '90s death-doom.

Formed in 1989, Anthropomancy started out as a thrash band but eventually slowed things way down and dropped a single demo in 1993, aptly titled Demo 1993. The demo is four tracks that clock in at about 45 minutes total, all of which are absolutely soaked in that miserable, grey-sky death-doom sound that the UK was so good at producing during that era of death metal.

What really stands out to me about this demo is how confident and deliberate the songwriting is. There's no real filler, there's no meandering atmospherics for the sake of it. Each track feels very tightly constructed despite being pretty long because it's death-doom, and they use minimal elements to build these massive, hypnotic atmospheres that really keep you engaged.

From the mournful acoustics and chant-like vocals of "Journey Song," to the ghostly layering and séance-like intensity of "Gutted," to the straight-up unhinged violence of "Body Infestation," and finally the funeral doom abyss that is the 17-minute closer "Mourner's Lament," every moment of this demo feels very intentional. They just lock into a vibe and really let it consume you.

It's not flashy — it's a lot more hypnotic than it is driving death metal — but it's devastatingly effective. What makes this demo even more insane to me, at least, is that most of the band didn't really go on to do anything else in metal, at least not that I could find. The one exception is drummer Jenny Andrews, who played in another band called Covenant that put out one demo in 1992.

Otherwise, this was a one-and-done affair for everybody else involved. And that probably explains why Demo 1993 didn't take on a bigger legacy — there was no post-Anthropomancy project to keep the name alive, no momentum, nobody really went on to do anything else, so the conversation just kind of died. It was just one solid demo and then silence for the rest of eternity.

Demo 1993 was reissued once by Rotting Misery in 2018 across 300 copies pressed to vinyl. It was never on CD, it was never issued digitally — the only reissue that it got was again this one vinyl pressing. But I did notice that the reissue was listed online as featuring an interview with the band included in an issue of the Deprived No. 2 zine in 1994.

So I dug up some scans of that interview and — hey — we've got a little information on Anthropomancy, at least from the perspective of vocalist Andy Richardson, who the interview was conducted with. When asked in that interview if he'd describe their sound as doomy, Richardson responded:

"I think it's fair to describe our sound as doomy but it's more than that, I hope!! Words I would use are miserable, gothic, beautiful (in places), dodgy, rip-off (but who isn't these days!!)."

And yeah, the guy clearly has a sense of humor. When asked about the band's plans for the year, he said: "First and foremost, the plan is to make sure the band survives another year. Anything on top of that is a bonus. Of course we'd like to get a record deal, sell 5 million copies of the subsequent LP, make loads of cash, and retire to Norway. I'm not entirely convinced that it's going to happen quite that soon, so I'll settle for a few gigs with some bigger bands."

We may never really know what happened to the members of Anthropomancy after this, but Demo 1993 deserves way more recognition than it's gotten. It's a hidden gem of early '90s death-doom, and with any luck it'll find its way into the right hands for a much wider release someday.