photos by Tomasz Kępka
“Born Of Stitch And Flesh” is the ripping new track from Warsaw, Poland-based technical thrash metal trio SPECIES. The song marks the latest warning shot from the band’s impending second album, Changelings, nearing release on 20 Buck Spin.
Produced by SPECIES and Filip Pągowski, the drums for Changelings were recorded at Nebula Studio by Tomasz Stołowski, while the guitars, bass, and vocals were recorded at No Stress Studio by Filip Pągowski who also mixed the album. The album was mastered at Subterranean Watchtower Studios by Damian Herring, completed with cover art and logo by Aleksandra Pawłowska and photography by Tomasz Kępka, and the song “Voyager” features synthesizers by Krzysztof Buffi.
Changelings is that rare album nowadays that still can surprise in the most triumphant and euphoric way possible: technical progressive thrash of the highest order. Adherents to the works of Coroner, Voivod, Kreator, Hypnosia, Anacrusis, Watchtower, Death, King Crimson, Rush, Master, Hexx, Horrendous, welcome SPECIES to your repertoire.
With the new single, the band states, “‘Born Of Stitch And Flesh’ was actually the first track we wrote for Changelings, although it went through a series of metamorphoses throughout the years. The song simply shows some love towards zombies and body horror through a story of a hideous creature sewn together from many corpses. Oh, and it has pretty cool bass and guitar solos.”
Stream SPECIES’ “Born Of Stitch And Flesh” everywhere including YouTube HERE and Bandcamp HERE.
Changelings will arrive on LP, CD, MC, and digitally on September 19th. Find preorders at the 20 Buck Spin web arsenal HERE and Bandcamp HERE, and watch the video for “The Essence” HERE.
Anticipate the deployment of additional videos and more to occur shortly.
Following their recent duo of shows supporting Dark Angel in Wroclaw and Warsaw, SPECIES has just announced a hometown release show for Changelings for October 11th, with more tour dates currently being plotted.
SPECIES Live:
10/11/2025 New Vegas Club Ursynów – Warsaw, PL *album release show w/ Gallower, Pandemic [info]
SPECIES is bassist/vocalist Piotr Drobina, drummer Przemysław Hampelski, and guitarist Michał Kępka. Their debut album, To Find Deliverance, leveled us with its rare blend of technical thrash prowess and unorthodox but highly inspired songwriting, enough to make 20 Buck Spin’s Best Of 2022 album list. Out of that list a collaboration was born, and now SPECIES is poised to make their label debut with their incoming second album, Changelings, also marking the first Polish act to sign with the label.
A step up in every regard, SPECIES’ Changelings is astonishing in its accomplished precision and how much it manages to achieve within the scope of individual tracks and as a cohesive whole. The album features an overload of angular guitar warfare, traditional Euro-thrash aggression with a modern resonance, rhythmic percussive seizures, and intricate basslines that make their intention deeply felt, not just following the guitar but dialoguing with it in a way that offers a second melodic brain to the album. In combination these elements thread seamlessly to give Changelings its colorful and uncanny vision, as if John Carpenter had co-produced Rust In Peace behind the iron curtain. It’s bristling with sci-fi paranoia, alien terror, and a hint of Cold War menace. The early convergence of thrash metal with death metal is also unmistakably present in the shape-shifting sound of SPECIES.
While there’s more than enough primitive and traditional thrash bands to go around, SPECIES embraces the genre’s lesser-travelled road of forward-thinking virtuosity and inventive experimentation, showing there’s still plenty of fertile ground to seed new musical territory. Nowhere is it more apparent than on 10-minute album closer “Biological Masterpiece,” where the band displays all its weapons; hyperspeed assaults, dystopian lulls, and instrumental mastery, in a climatic saga beyond space and time.
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