Septicflesh’s ‘The Great Mass’ (2011): ten tracks where the orchestra is not decoration

Septicflesh’s ‘The Great Mass’, the Greek band’s eighth studio album, released in April 2011, forces a confrontation the genre usually sidesteps. The album places death metal’s grinding machinery and layered orchestral writing in direct contact across ten tracks, with neither element functioning as background. Where most heavy records that draw on classical arrangements use the orchestration for mood or texture, ‘The Great Mass’ assigns it structural weight: the symphonic lines carry the melodic logic, and the metal instrumentation drives the rhythm and physical mass forward.

That division of labor sets the record apart from the broad category of symphonic metal. The genre has a long history of deploying strings and choirs to soften or elevate death metal’s aggression — ‘The Great Mass’ does neither. The Greek group has pursued this pairing across their catalogue, but the scale and compositional commitment on this album exceeds earlier attempts. The result is a record that demands attention from both ends of its source materials: the death metal is uncompromised, and the orchestral writing is not decorative.

The genre context matters for anyone unfamiliar with symphonic death metal’s particular demands. The form requires two kinds of technical precision that rarely coexist: the unforgiving execution standards of death metal, and the compositional vocabulary of orchestral writing. Most acts that attempt the fusion drift toward one end — accessible symphonic metal with a death metal aesthetic, or pure death metal with orchestral additions. Septicflesh work at the rarer intersection, where both forms are load-bearing rather than decorative.

The audience data reflects the commitment. Over 55,600 listeners and more than 1.3 million Last.fm plays position ‘The Great Mass’ as a record with deep catalog traction rather than chart-adjacent visibility — numbers that indicate repeated listens from a dedicated listener base. Symphonic death metal holds particular strength in European markets, and the Greek band occupies a distinctive position within the genre: the Mediterranean context gives their orchestral writing a dark, austere quality that differs from the Scandinavian end of the symphonic metal spectrum.

The album’s ambition carries its own risks. The production challenge of merging death metal’s sonic density with full orchestral arranging produces moments where the layers feel additive rather than fused — passages where the two elements share the same space without fully integrating. Listeners outside the genre will likely find the sound world opaque on a first pass; the record rewards extended engagement rather than immediate accessibility.

The record was made between July and September 2010 at Devasoundz in Greece and The Abyss in Sweden, with Peter Tägtgren producing. Christos Antoniou wrote the orchestration, and the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra recorded it. The album was widely acclaimed on release, and in 2021 Metal Hammer ranked it ninth in its list of the best symphonic metal albums of all time.

‘The Great Mass’ is not a new release: it came out on 11 April 2011, and a new digital edition was listed in August 2026, fifteen years later.

Correction: an earlier version of this article presented ‘The Great Mass’ as a new release and said it had no Spotify distribution. The album was released in 2011; the 2026 listing is a new digital edition.

Tags: death metal, 2011, melodic death metal, Septicflesh, symphonic death metal, symphonic metal