Review by Rick Eaglestone
Twenty years is a long time to spend in Hell. Beyond Hell, GWAR’s tenth studio album, first clawed its way out of the underworld in the summer of 2006, and it arrived at a peculiar hinge point in the Scumdogs’ long and blood-soaked history: the moment the world’s most notorious shock-rock band, forever dismissed as a novelty by people who had never actually listened, quietly made one of the most musically accomplished records of their career.
Two decades on, GWAR return to it with a fully remastered deluxe edition, the first time this rock opera has ever been pressed to vinyl, and the reissue carries a weight the original could not have anticipated. Beyond Hell is one of only two GWAR albums fronted from start to finish by Oderus Urungus alone. Dave Brockie, the band’s irreplaceable, obscene, brilliant heart, who left this planet for good in 2014, and it captures a line-up that has since lost not only him but Cory Smoot, the Flattus Maximus whose guitar did so much to drag GWAR out of clown-rock and into the metal elite, gone in 2011. What was once simply a very good, very filthy concept record is now, unavoidably, a memorial. The joke, it turns out, had a heart, and time has made it ache.
It helps to remember what Beyond Hell was, and who built it. Recorded across the spring and summer of 2006 between the band’s own Slave Pit Studios in Richmond and Devin Townsend’s studio in Vancouver, the album was produced by GWAR alongside Townsend, the Strapping Young Lad mastermind whose fingerprints, dense, widescreen, ferociously heavy are all over it, and by Cory Smoot, who engineered and mixed as well as played. Townsend even lent his voice to the backing vocals on Tormentor, a small marriage of two of underground metal’s most gleefully unhinged sensibilities. That pedigree is precisely why Beyond Hell has aged into one of GWAR’s most respected records: it is the sound of a band whose reputation rested on latex costumes and gallons of fake bodily fluid proving, almost as an afterthought, that they could write and play with genuine muscle.
For the anniversary edition, Paul Logus the mastering name attached to Anthrax and Killswitch Engage, among many others has given the whole thing a fresh remaster, and the physical package is lavish: a 180-gram, first-ever vinyl pressing in an elaborate tri-fold jacket that unfolds into an inverted cross, a gold variant capped at two thousand copies, blood-smeared and blood-moon variants rarer still, and a deluxe CD with a fold-out poster. Best of all, the sessions have given up a secret: a previously unreleased Outro, recorded back in 2006 and left in the vault until now.
By 2006 GWAR had spent five years refining the thrash-forward sound they set loose on Violence Has Arrived and sharpened on War Party, and Beyond Hell was the album where the narrative ambition finally caught up with the chops. This is a full-blooded rock opera, the band’s most committed stab at one since RagNaRok a decade earlier, following GWAR’s flight from the massed armies of humanity down into the tunnels beneath the Earth, through Hell itself, to a final confrontation with a Satan who has made the grave error of reckoning himself a tougher beast than Oderus. It is gloriously, unrepentantly stupid, and it is played with a straight-faced conviction that makes the stupidity land like scripture. The reissue asks a fair question of anyone who owned the original: do you need this? For the newcomer the answer is simpler: this is one of the best possible places to discover that GWAR were always far more than a punchline, but the remaster, the vinyl, the unearthed Outro and the sheer melancholy of hearing Brockie and Smoot in their pomp together make a persuasive case even to the faithful. Some anniversaries are marketing. This one feels closer to a wake with a very good open bar.
Intro does exactly what a rock opera’s overture should, setting the scene with mounting dread rather than any actual song, the sound of GWAR having slept through half their own war and waking to find the world already on fire. It is scene-setting theatre, the curtain rising on the carnage to come, and it exists chiefly to make the detonation that follows hit twice as hard.
War Is All We Know is where the record proper kicks the doors in, and it remains one of the leanest, meanest openers in the catalogue. Balsac the Jaws of Death and Flattus Maximus trade fast, interlocking riffs while Oderus barks the tale of GWAR defending their fortress from the armies of the Nazi Pope, and Jizmak Da Gusha’s drums come to the fore in a slow, dissonant mid-song lurch before the whole thing accelerates back into the light. It is thrash with a grin and a body count, and it sets the stakes with brutal economy: the fortress is nuked, the band retreats, and the descent begins.
Murderer’s Muse follows hard on its heels in a similar register, Oderus reaching back towards the snarlier delivery of the This Toilet Earth years while samples from the 1964 curio Evil Brain from Outer Space bleed through the mix. It is the sound of a band in full flight, licking their wounds after the retreat and plotting their way underground, and it keeps the album’s momentum barrelling forward without ever letting the concept slow the riffs down.
Go To Hell! the title GWAR very nearly gave the whole album is the point of no return, the plunge from the surface world into the infernal underneath. It is a statement of intent as much as a song, all forward motion and gleeful damnation, and it functions as the hinge on which the entire narrative swings from war above to horror below. Twenty years later it still sounds like a door being kicked off its hinges, and it was smart of the band to keep the phrase as a permanent fixture of the record even after they settled on the grander title.
I Love The Pigs leans into the satire that has always been GWAR’s real weapon behind the foam and the gore, a blast of provocation aimed squarely at authority. It is coarse, it is funny, and it is meaner than it first appears, the band have never needed subtlety when a sledgehammer will do, and in sequence it keeps the mood pitched somewhere between a riot and a punchline.
Tormentor carries a small piece of history in its grooves, with Devin Townsend himself adding backing vocals to the assault. You can feel the producer’s hand tightening here, the arrangement denser and more layered than GWAR typically bother with, and the result is one of the album’s most purely heavy moments, a reminder that beneath the theatre this is a serious metal record made by serious metal musicians.
Eighth Lock is the track GWAR have chosen to lead the reissue campaign, resurfacing it as the remastered single complete with its long-lost, never-before-seen music video, and the choice makes sense the instant it kicks in. It is one of the record’s most immediate cuts, and Logus’s remaster gives it fresh teeth, pulling the guitars forward and letting the low end breathe. Dusting off the accompanying video after twenty years is a lovely touch, a small act of archaeology that reconnects the songs to the ludicrous, wonderful spectacle they were always meant to soundtrack.
Destroyed is exactly as advertised, a mid-album battering that keeps the pressure high as GWAR press deeper into the underworld. There is no let-up here, no reflective breather — just the band doing what they do with total commitment, the riffs stacked and the tempo unforgiving, driving the story onward towards its confrontation. In the fresh remaster it hits noticeably harder than it used to, the kind of track that benefits most from Logus giving the rhythm section room to land its punches cleanly.
The Ultimate Bohab is a knowing wink to the faithful — “Bohab” being GWAR’s own affectionate slang for their most devoted fans, and it plays like the band turning to grin at the very people who followed them all the way down into Hell. It is a moment of communion in the middle of the carnage, and knowing the term gives it a warmth the uninitiated might miss entirely.
The One That Will Not Be Named is the album’s climactic set-piece, the face-to-face with Satan himself. The Overlord of Hell is voiced here by Jewcifer, the character portrayed by Matt Maguire both on record and on the tour that followed, and the track boasts a guitar solo from Todd Evans, the Beefcake the Mighty of this era, stepping out from behind the bass. It is the narrative’s summit, the reason the whole descent was undertaken, and it is staged with all the operatic excess the concept demands.
Back In Crack brings the story home, GWAR emerging from the underworld the only way they know how — victorious, filthy, and entirely unrepentant. As a closer to the original album, it is a fitting release of pressure after the confrontation, the sound of the Scumdogs dusting themselves off and clawing back towards the light, having once again proven too reckless for even Hell to hold.
Outro, the anniversary edition’s genuine reason for existing beyond the remaster, is the previously unreleased coda pulled from those same 2006 sessions. There is a real poignancy to hearing “new” GWAR music recorded by this exact line-up two decades after the fact, a few final minutes of Brockie and Smoot that nobody had heard until now. It rounds the record off with an unexpected grace note, and for long-time devotees it alone may justify the reissue: a small, belated gift from a band and a moment that time has since taken away.
What lingers, once the last riff decays, is how well this holds up and how strange it is to feel genuine emotion at the end of a record about a Jesus-and-Hitler hybrid guiding intergalactic warriors through the pit. Beyond Hell was always one of GWAR’s most musically satisfying albums, and Logus’s remaster does it real favours, giving the guitars a weight and clarity the 2006 master occasionally smeared. It is not a subtle record, and it was never meant to be the comedy is broad, the concept is daft, and a listener allergic to GWAR’s brand of scatological grand guignol will not be converted by a shinier mix. But that was never the point. The point is that underneath the foam-latex spectacle sat a band who could genuinely play, and Beyond Hell remains the clearest proof they ever committed to tape.
The remaster is an improvement rather than a revelation, and purists who love the rougher edges of the original DRT pressing may find themselves shrugging. Yet to weigh it purely as a product is to miss what this release is. It is a band, and a fanbase, taking a moment to honour a record that has quietly become a landmark and to sit for a while with two departed friends whose work has only grown in stature since they left.
That is the real triumph of this edition. Set against the untouchable filth-and-fury of Scumdogs of the Universe it is a different, more considered beast, and it never tries to out-anthem the classics; but as a showcase for GWAR the musicians rather than GWAR the circus, it stands among their very finest hours. The first-ever vinyl, the lavish packaging and the resurrected Outro turn a simple anniversary into something closer to a proper tribute. Twenty years on, Beyond Hell still hits like a maggot the size of a bus, and the fact that it now moves you as readily as it pummels you is a testament to a band the world spent far too long refusing to take seriously. That the reissue arrives alongside a fresh run of live dates only underlines the point: this was never a band content to let a landmark gather dust. GWAR always knew the joke. This is the record that proved they meant it.
“I had been a GWAR fan since I was a kid. I loved the freedom, the metal, the spectacle, and the passion that went into it all.” — Devin Townsend, producer of Beyond Hell
Beyond Hell (20th Anniversary Edition) – Track listing:
1. Intro
2. War Is All We Know
3. Murderer’s Muse
4. Go To Hell!
5. I Love The Pigs
6. Tormentor
7. Eighth Lock
8. Destroyed
9. The Ultimate Bohab
10. The One That Will Not Be Named
11. Back In Crack
12. Outro (previously unreleased)
Line-up (2006):
Oderus Urungus (Dave Brockie) – Lead vocals
Flattus Maximus (Cory Smoot) – Lead guitar, backing vocals, production.
Balsac the Jaws of Death (Mike Derks) – Rhythm guitar, backing vocals.
Beefcake the Mighty (Todd Evans) – Bass, backing vocals.
Jizmak Da Gusha (Brad Roberts) – Drums, percussion
Devin Townsend – Producer, backing vocals (“Tormentor”)
Reissue: Remastered by Paul Logus · Released 25 September 2026 · Pit Records
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8/10
