Underground Chaos

Writing the history of this scene is a monumental task. People are hard to track down, and memories have started to go hazy. So before the long stories, here’s a taste of what it sounded like: the first release on my record label, a double CD mastered in a backstreet studio off Tariq Road while naat recordings went on in the booths next door.

Underground Chaos was the first release on GmH Records. It mixed bands from the scene’s early years with ones active up to around 2010, and it arrived just as things had started to die out. The label’s full story comes later. This is the story of its first record.

The Artist We Couldn’t Afford

I’d wanted Justin Bartlett (Vberkvlt) for the artwork and couldn’t afford him. Justin introduced me to Kevin Gan Yeun (Viraloptic), whose work you might have seen for Sunn O))) and Wolves in the Throne Room, and Kevin did the CD and the poster.

We pressed 250 copies, a double CD with a poster, and sold around 150.

Or We Reject the Whole Lot

We obsessed over the smallest details. At one point we argued with the printer about getting the label and compilation name printed on the back of the actual CD. Either they printed it, or we’d reject the whole lot. They gave in. The printer is a senior banker now. Solid guy.

Collecting the music and the permissions was even better. It’s also the part I’d handle differently now: more bands should have been on it. I’ll cover the ones who weren’t in another dispatch, and later in their own stories.

Mastered Next to a Naat Session

About 90% of the music had been recorded on home PCs, so the quality was all over the place. Some tracks only had sound on one channel. Babar Sheikh took me to a studio in the backstreets of Tariq Road. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t even midrange. But the man there did a great job mastering the compilation, while the two other booths in the studio were busy recording naats.

Here’s the record, track by track.

An obvious opener, and yes, partly because of the thunder. But this was also a special time for Dusk: their sound was changing. They’d always been on the doomy, proggy side, and this was when they pushed toward death and thrash. We were on an insane thrash trip ourselves. Every Sunday I’d be at Babar’s for four or five hours of nothing but South American and European thrash: Coroner, Barbatos, Morbid Saint, Sarcófago.

It was the last track to arrive before we went in for mastering. Yusri of Cardiac Necropsy was Dusk’s vocalist in this era, but Babar sang this one. Babar also played bass on Impiety’s Formidonis Nex Cultus. GmH went on to release Dusk’s split with Singapore’s Distrust. This is still the best Dusk has ever sounded to me.

I had no idea these guys existed until Babar played them for me. They were originally called Eleventh Hour, and changed their name to Venom Vault around 2008. This was some of the most in-your-face thrash I’d ever heard coming out of Pakistan. Loud as fuck, too. They didn’t do much after a couple of demos.

Jonathan Jones, their lead guitarist, went on to produce singles for other underground acts and now performs with Haroon (of Awaaz and Burka Avenger fame).

Straight-up old-school death metal from Karachi. Cardinal Sin and Communal Grave shared members but sounded nothing alike. This track was exclusive to the compilation and hadn’t been released before.

The band was working on an album at the time, and we planned to release it on GmH, but we fell out of touch and the label eventually shut down. I don’t think they finished it. Release the album if you did, boys! I’m not sure where the others are today, but Nabeel Imam, one of their guitarists, migrated and is a data scientist now. You can take some of his courses on DataCamp (how cool is that?).

I knew nothing about this band back then except that Babar sent me the track, and I still don’t know much. An absolute mystery, probably because the man behind it moved abroad and wasn’t in touch with people back home.

Babar tells me he named the band, because the music sounded like gravel soul to him. Asad, who was apparently behind it, had moved to the UK and was launching a new band called Death the Band (?? I mean ??), and Babar helped with that name too. He also titled the track for the compilation. It didn’t sound like anything else in the scene: Gandhi and Jinnah snippets, Meshuggah lite. Sold. Gravel Soul also had a horrible Call cover on their MySpace page.

Saqib Malik was a massive figure in the Lahore underground, and more consistent than most of the extreme metal bands coming out of that scene. Pretty much every project of his had at least one release, a demo, single or album: Corpsepyre, Sifr. By this time Saqib had moved to the US and started his own label, Esto Perpetua Records.

Black Albatross was called Funeral Junkie when Saqib was still in Pakistan. He was recording a lot of music under different projects then, and making a lot of video too, including one of him performing an autopsy with a Black Albatross track playing in the background. It was never released. Brian Zimmerman of T.O.M.B. was also in Black Albatross, and Saqib was briefly in T.O.M.B. too, if I’m not wrong, though there’s no record of it online.

Hell Dormant was a side project of Kamran Farooq (Autopsy Gothic) and Wasi Raza (Nokturnal Rust). I have a lot to say about this band and the story behind their Mass Grave album, but that’s for a future dispatch.

Hell Dormant was one of the few bands in the early 2000s to actually release an album. Picking one track from it was hard, but I went with Twisted for its death ’n’ roll swing. Only one of Kamran’s other main projects went on to release a full album, and nothing ever came from Wasi, which is crazy considering this side project was written and recorded in a few weeks.

Melodic death metal from Karachi. Communal Grave were a regular fixture in whatever was left of the underground by then. They played shows alongside cover bands, and were always the only ones playing originals.

Jamail Rafi had other projects before this, but I can’t find them anywhere now. He uploaded one to the Messiah forums; I think it was called Blood Ripper, or War Ripper? There was talk of releasing the Communal Grave album on GmH, but they went with another label, and in the end released their debut album themselves.

Orion set the standard for a lot of local bands by putting their album out online. The submission came from their drummer, Bilal. Some scene veterans who also played in better-known rock bands were a part of Odyssey too. Their vocalist was outstanding, and they got Hammad from Corpsepyre to guest on one of the album’s tracks.

Both guitarists went on to form Odyssey after the vocalist and drummer moved abroad to study. GmH also released the Odyssey album, one of the first proper releases by an underground metal band in Pakistan. Waqas Ahmed now has another band, Doomsday Astronaut, who played Wacken in 2024. Great guys, great band.

Reckoning Storm was Saad Akhter’s one-man band. Instrumental metal. He also briefly played with Communal Grave, was deep in Karachi’s anime and manga scene, and went on to write music for games. My favorite Reckoning Storm track is still Lashkar. Banger. Why didn’t I pick that one? It was too short.

One of the first black metal tracks to come out of Pakistan. Heavy Darkthrone worship. They only ever had the one track.

This was Salman Mumtaz and Essam Chaudhry’s band. Salman was a huge part of the underground and instrumental in helping a lot of us find and share music. I think I still have one of his mIRC MP3 lists on a hard drive somewhere. I’m fairly sure a lot of us would never have found half the extreme metal we did in the early 2000s without him.

To this day, the filthiest-sounding raw black metal you will ever hear out of Pakistan. Their only EP came out on vinyl on the label run by Shaxul of Deathspell Omega. This was one of Babar’s many projects.

They played live once in Lahore, and once in Karachi at a show with metalcore bands. That one was fucking hilarious: the kids tried to start a moshpit, got pushed into the wall by Ibad, and were terrified. They were also meant to play Zakfest 2, but left because their set was running late. I opened this side with them because that intro is haunting. That’s Tanseer Dar of Karavan screaming, and it gets more intense as the screams build.

Still, in my opinion, one of our biggest losses. So much potential, short bursts of genius, and most people never saw them live or heard their music. Autopsy Gothic was one of the few bands playing original music in the late 90s, and they were at the legendary Shemhamforash gig. Their story will get its own dispatch.

Besides Bloodshed they had only two other finished tracks, plus demos here and there, so picking one wasn’t easy. In the end we didn’t go with their greatest track (more on that later!). Autopsy Gothic later “loaned” their song Coward to Soul Vomit, who played it live regularly. And Nabeel from Messiah was originally in Autopsy Gothic too.

Another of Babar’s projects, and a short-lived one. They only recorded two tracks, and one of them is now lost.

The band came together when Babar was visiting Germany. Arish Khan (of King Khan and the Shrines) had asked Babar if he could play in Dusk, saying he wanted to play something heavy and dirty. So they recorded two tracks. The drums were a toy kit that belonged to Arish’s daughter, and the intro is done in the style of a Lollywood villain’s dialogue. Arish is also the man behind the TikTok-viral Love You So by the King Khan & BBQ Show. You’ve almost certainly heard it.

Corpsepyre were ahead of the scene. While most people were in cover bands playing Metallica, they were writing gory originals. They played a few shows in Lahore, too.

This was Saqib and Hammad’s band. Both were active on the Dusk forums, and Hammad got vocal tips from Karl Sanders of Nile on the Morbid Angel forums. This band could have been so much more.

I read about Aufgang in Dawn’s Images before I ever heard them. The first time I actually heard them was on the Hearts of Darkness compilation. This was Babar’s project with Bargees Buns on saxophone (he also played at the Avari Hotel in Karachi) and Rizwan (who also plays with Babar in Chand Taara Orchestra and was in Ganda Banda and the 3D Cats).

Dark. Gloomy. Weird. Never done again in Pakistan. Turn the lights out on a rainy night and play this track.

Burzukh was a one-man band that covered a wide range of genres. Syed Suleiman Ali was very active online in the early 2000s and reviewed a lot of industrial music. He apparently played in a bunch of bands in Pakistan, and listed names like The Banned, Holy Black and Dark Death. His website URL was the first place I ever saw the term Muslim Punk.

Saqib’s best-known project after Corpsepyre. A solo project with one demo. It was meant to be on the Rise of the Eastern Blood compilation, but that didn’t happen. I can’t say for sure, but I think this track was previously unreleased.

Dementia were a groove metal band from Lahore, and very active on the live circuit. A couple of singles here and there, including one in Urdu. Hussam from Orion and Odyssey joined them briefly later on.

Mohammad Omar Shahid, their vocalist, is my second cousin, and it’s so strange that we reconnected after years through metal circles. I don’t think we’d spoken in over a decade before that. I really dig what they did with The Plague.

An avant-garde project from Taimur Mazhar and Omar Asim (both of 6LA8) and Asadullah Qureshi (Lower Sindh! Swing Orchestra). An early recording by the 6LA8 boys, and one of their first, if I’m not wrong. I don’t know much about the band beyond that. Asad now performs as Malamati.

Another one-off project from Salman and Essam, this time featuring Aneeq Zaman. I asked him how it came about and he said, “They asked me to record something and I did it.” Legend.

Seventeen years later all of this reads differently. Of the bands on it that the archive knows about, only one is still active today. The rest just stopped with no formal announcements. For some of them, this compilation is most of what they left behind. Utuk Xul only ever had the one track. Haramzada recorded two, and one of them is lost.

That was the point of putting it out. Without it, a lot of this music would only exist on old hard drives, or not at all.

If you bought one of those 150 copies, hold on to it.