Sacramento deathcore outfit Saltwound are back with ‘Pound of Flesh’, a standalone single featuring Ringo Waterman of fellow California heavyweights Mugshot.

Released via SharpTone Records, the track follows Saltwound’s 2024 debut album The Temptation of Pain and picks up where that record left off, combining deathcore and metalcore with the blunt, groove-heavy approach the band have dubbed “Norcal Violence”.

‘Pound of Flesh’ is built around thick riffs and an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere, with Waterman’s guest appearance adding another voice to the track without disrupting Saltwound’s own identity. There’s little wasted movement here. The band get in, make their point and leave the wreckage behind.

Lyrically, vocalist Spencer Timmons is looking at relationships through a particularly cynical lens, examining the feeling that everyone wants something from you, regardless of whether they arrive professing love or outright dislike.

“Everybody just wants to take a chunk out of you for themselves,” Timmons explains. “Some days I honestly prefer the people that hate me more; at least there’s an innate honesty there.”

The accompanying video keeps pace with the track’s confrontational mood, while the collaboration with Waterman makes sense given the common ground between Saltwound and Mugshot and their respective positions within California’s current heavy music scene.

Saltwound formed in California and released two independent EPs before signing with Good Fight Music. Their third EP, In the Shadow of the Valley of Death, arrived in 2023, followed a year later by The Temptation of Pain. That debut full-length included ‘Hollow’, ‘Severance’, ‘Walking the Blade’ and ‘Empty from the Start’, and gave the band a wider platform for the sound they had been developing through their earlier releases.

Touring has been equally important to that growth. Saltwound have previously hit the road with Maylene and the Sons of Disaster and The Last Ten Seconds of Life, and will return to North American stages later this month for the Death Coast ’26 tour with Cultist.

For now, ‘Pound of Flesh’ works as a bridge from The Temptation of Pain towards whatever Saltwound have planned next. It doesn’t radically redraw their sound, but it does find them tightening the screws, with Waterman proving a particularly effective accomplice.

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