Panchiko's D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L is a Nottingham four-piece's bedroom project from 2000 that vanished, degraded on a charity shop CD, then got salvaged and mythologised online two decades later. The original seven tracks lean on programmed drums, sampled textures and guitars that sit somewhere between shoegaze wash and indie rock jangle. Owain's vocals drift through the mix rather than front it. There's sequencing throughout but it never sounds like dance music, more like kids working out how to layer things on limited kit.
The second half appends four "R>O>T" versions of earlier tracks, named for the disc rot that ate the original CD. They're lo-fi, warped, half-absent. Whether that decay happened naturally or got enhanced for effect is unclear, but it gives the release an accidental archival quality. The whole thing runs under nineteen minutes. If you came to this hoping the title was literal, it is not: no metal of any kind. It's slight, unpolished alternative rock with electronic elements, interesting mainly for how it circulated and who found it years later.
