The Death Metal Soundtrack For Running In Place

Yesterday and today I gave treadmills a shot again for the first time in about 12 years. I didn't have a bad experience with them the first go round, but just never got hooked on it. I didn't become a regular "runner" until about two years ago and I still have stretches of a month or two where I'll fall out of the habit of doing it regularly, but I do try to get back to it because I feel so much better and have a ton more energy when I'm running on a regular basis. I hadn't run for the past two weeks while dealing with a move, but my new building has a 24 hour gym in it and while I prefer running outside, it has been cold and rainy the past two days, so I decided to give the treadmills a try again.

Today I set the treadmill to 60 minutes and prepared to grind out 5.5 miles. I hadn't put much thought into what to listen to while running and just hit play to continue whatever was happening on shuffle from the previous day's run. Yesterday I did not fast forward once, but today I definitely needed more motivational music to keep me going. I powered through a Band Of Horses and a Dredg song, but picked up my tempo a lot more during jams by Nothingface and The Toadies. As the run got into the final stages I had to skip The Verve, The Flaming Lips, Jason Isbell and a few others on a quest to find something to keep my legs pumping and finally stopped on Gorguts.

I own the Gorguts 1998 album Obscura and listened to it once half-heartedly and thought it was good, but haven't gotten around to revisiting it yet. I really paid attention to this song though and found it not only to be great running music, but also understand from this one song why they are always cited as being ahead of their time in the death metal genre. I also recently discovered the death metal veterans Asphyx and am looking forward to playing their album Death...The Brutal Way back to back with Obscura in the very near future (like as soon as I hit "Publish Post" on this).

Gorguts "The Art Of Sombre Ecstasy"



Asphyx "Death? The Brutal Way"