Back in 2014, scrolling through the usual social media scrapyard, Jack Simmons was startled by one friend’s post: a performance video by Russian vocalist Aleksandr “Alex Terrible” Shikolai. At this point, the singer hadn’t yet gone viral with his extreme cover versions, which reinvented everything from Queen’s “We Will Rock You” to Post Malone’s “Congratulations.” But Simmons was riveted — and knew he needed to pounce.  “I took a look, before it was even getting the traction that he ended up getting,” he says. “It blew me away, to be honest. I just thought, ‘Fucking hell, I need to write some music with this guy. I want to hear this over my guitars.’”The British musician was so struck by the singer’s technique — which ranges from blood-curdling death-core growls to melodic rock belting — that he reached out immediately, unbothered by the fact that they lived in different countries. More specifically, these practical concerns didn’t even occur to him.
“To be honest, it wasn’t even really like that,” he says. “At the time, we didn’t really see it going this far. It was more like, ‘Oh, sick, Let’s just write some music. This is gonna be great.’ Once we started putting out some songs, it actually started taking off. Then the thoughts came of, ‘OK, we’re gonna need to tour. How are we gonna do it? Where are we gonna do it?’ That’s when the determination kicked in: ‘We have something really good here.’ It very quickly turned from something very casual into the place where it is now.”That “now” is Kostolom, the epic second LP from the duo’s band Slaughter to Prevail. The album expands on the dynamic extremes of their 2017 debut, Misery Sermon — pairing Alex’s dark, cathartic lyrics with Simmons’ pummeling riffs and tense, cinematic solos. “We wanted to make each song for us stand out in a different way,” the guitarist says. “On some of the songs, we focused on wanting to keep it uptempo, building to a breakdown as the focal point. Other songs it was about groove or the chorus — ‘how can we make this melodic?’ The albums we love the most have those dynamics, and we want to use them to make each part hit harder.”
File-swapping between England and Russia, Alex and Simmons organically crafted the songs without much literal discussion. “We just send it back and forth,” he adds. “Honestly it’s as simple as that. I’ve played in a quite a lot of bands where we try to write together, and this is the easiest way I’ve written songs. I’ll build the track, and once I’ve got a rough draft of my vision — which could be two riffs or three minutes of music — I’ll send it over, and we say, ‘OK, this part works and this doesn’t.’ And we send it back and forth until we’re both happy.” 
Even though the final product is packed with headphone-worthy details — the textural guitars on the back-end of “Bonebreaker,” the tempo changes on “Demolisher,” the funky drum breaks on "Zavali Ebalo,” the blown-out drum EQ and tremolo-style riffs on “Ouroboros” — it was never overwrought. The songs evolved over several years, the first demos constructed shortly before the release of Misery Sermon. And they finally finished the material in late 2020, with everyone (Alex, Simmons, bassist Mikhail Petrov, guitarist Dmitry Mamedov) having tracked their respective parts at home. (Evgeny Novikov recorded his drums at a nearby studio in Moscow.)  
Throughout that long haul, they did have one broad creative goal: to make a whole album of “violent, pissed-off music.”“We didn’t focus on ‘Is this death-metal? Is it not death-metal?’” Simmons says. “We just went for it, like, ‘How can we make this [interesting], like our favorite albums?’ The classics like Hatebreed and Slayer and even some new stuff. We’re trying to find that sense of danger, almost like a horror movie.”
Kostolom certainly delivers the danger: Tracks like “Made in Russia” and “Head on a Plate” pile-drive their detuned riffs straight into your skull, offering a platform for Alex at his most menacing. But the frontman also stretches out across the record, adding clean choruses to anthems like “Baba Yaga” and “Your Only.” 
Alex’s words — largely sung in Russian, with occasional bursts of English — are also more balanced than the bleak song titles may suggest. “The lyrics,” Simmons says, “are quite personal to anyone who listens, I think — of personal struggle, keeping a positive mental attitude and going through the shit to have a better life and achieve your goals.” Because of the long gestation period, a variety of sonic influences filtered into the project — even if they aren’t obvious on the surface. "There wasn’t necessarily one or two [inspirations], but I went through phases of listening to a lot of Bjork, a lot of New Orleans rap, a lot of nu-metal and black metal,” Simmons says. “I’ll go through phases where I’m not listening to much metal — just a lot of dark wave and moodier, more melodic stuff. It was all over the place, which the album probably showcases. It’s just whatever makes sense at the time.”
As always, Slaughter to Prevail aim to provoke you, even as they empower you.  
“We want something that causes an emotion — whether it’s good or bad, disappointment or excitement or whatever,” Simmons says. “We don’t want something that’s stereotypical.”