There is something beautifully twisted about Exhumed turning the open road into their latest blood soaked playground.
For decades now, the San Jose gore metal legends have dragged listeners through graveyards, operating theatres, splatter films, morgues, death, decay and every other rotten corner of extreme metal imagination. But on their latest album Red Asphalt, released earlier this year through Relapse Records, Exhumed have taken a hard left turn out of the cemetery and straight onto the highway.
It is still Exhumed in all the ways you want it to be. It is fast, filthy, riff driven, violent, ridiculous in the best possible way, and packed with that deathgrind energy that has made the band such a long running force in extreme music. But Red Asphalt also feels like a fresh setting for the chaos. This time the horror is not hiding in a lab, a grave or some late night video nasty. It is right there on the road, in the crash, in the wreckage, in the fumes, in the blood on the bitumen.
And with Exhumed now heading our way for a massive Australia and New Zealand tour, including their first ever New Zealand shows, the timing could not be better to catch up with Matt Harvey and talk through the latest chapter in the band’s blood soaked legacy.
For a band that has been doing this for more than three decades, Exhumed still sound like they are having a hell of a lot of fun finding new places to take the gore. That is one of the big things that stands out with Red Asphalt. This is not just gore for gore’s sake. It is Exhumed finding a new world to tear apart.
The road has always had a strange romance attached to it in rock and metal. Road songs, road albums, tour stories, highway freedom, cars, vans, buses, late nights, truck stops, endless stretches of nothing and the feeling of movement. But Exhumed look at that same thing and see something far more mangled.
On Red Asphalt, that romance gets smashed through a windscreen.
The album digs into the danger of highways, crashes, defective cars, road death, biker violence, gore soaked safety films and the weirdly everyday horror of something most of us do without thinking. It is familiar, but that is what makes it work. Everyone knows the feeling of being on the road. Everyone has seen a crash site. Everyone has driven past the flashing lights and twisted metal and felt that strange mix of curiosity and dread.
Exhumed have simply turned that feeling into a death metal record.
Tracks like Unsafe At Any Speed, Shovelhead and The Iron Graveyard bring that full throttle Exhumed attack while letting the album lean into sleaze, groove and road worn madness. There is a real sense of movement across the record. It does not just sound like a collection of songs. It feels like a ride through a horror film made out of broken engines, cracked asphalt, fake blood and fumes.
What also comes through in the interview is just how much Exhumed still believe in this album. Matt spoke about how strongly the band felt about the Red Asphalt material once they started building the live set, to the point where the first version apparently had far too many new songs for a regular show. That says a lot. Bands with a deep catalogue can sometimes treat new material like a polite obligation. Exhumed sound like they want to throw these songs straight into the pit and see what survives.
That is the other side of this band that can never be separated from the records. Exhumed live is its own beast.
The albums hit hard, but the real Exhumed experience has always been about the room. The sweat. The chainsaw. The fake blood. The crowd pressing forward. That moment where everything is loud, gross, funny, brutal and weirdly joyous all at once. In a world where so much of life happens through screens, heavy music still gives us those rare moments where everyone is actually in the same place, feeling the same thing, getting smashed by the same riffs.
That is exactly what this Australia and New Zealand run is built for.
This tour is a big one for a few reasons. Exhumed return to Australia for a stack of dates, they hit Perth Dethfest 2026 and Sydney Dethfest 2026, and they finally make their first ever trip to New Zealand. For a band that has been everywhere, doing something for the first time still carries some weight. New Zealand fans have waited long enough, and now they are getting Exhumed alongside NSW old school death metal crew Anoxia.
Australia gets its own killer support as well, with Western Australia’s Ashen joining the run and bringing more modern death metal weight to the shows. Sydney Dethfest also adds another huge moment, with Exhumed co headlining alongside technical death metal pioneers Origin.
That is not just a tour stop. That is a full death metal event.
For us here in Adelaide, Exhumed hit Ed Castle on Wednesday 3 June with Ashen. Anyone who knows that room knows this has the potential to be absolute carnage. It is tight, it is loud, and it is the kind of venue where a band like Exhumed can feel properly dangerous.
One of the best parts of chatting with Matt was how naturally the conversation moved beyond just album and tour promo. Red Asphalt opened up a whole road trip conversation, from Saxon’s Wheels Of Steel to old school mixtapes, burned CDs and the kind of music rituals a lot of us grew up with before everything was sitting in our pocket. There is a deep love of music culture in Matt that runs underneath the gore and the grind. Whether he is talking horror films, road songs, old tapes or touring, you can feel that lifer energy.
That matters because Exhumed are not just a band that survived. They are a band that has kept evolving without losing the stink.
From Gore Metal and Slaughtercult through to Death Revenge, Horror, To The Dead and now Red Asphalt, there has always been a different flavour of filth to each era. The sound has sharpened over the years, the songwriting has evolved, and the concepts have stretched out, but the core of Exhumed is still there. Riffs first. Gore everywhere. No interest in being polite.
Red Asphalt fits perfectly into that legacy because it gives Exhumed a new landscape to destroy. It is a road record, a crash record, a horror record and a deathgrind record all at once. It is also the sound of a band with a lot of history still finding something fresh to get excited about.
That is why this tour feels like such a ripper. You are not just getting a legacy band coming down to play the hits. You are getting Exhumed with a killer new chapter in the tank, a road wreck of an album built for the stage, and decades of gore metal madness behind them.
So crank Red Asphalt, and if you are in Australia or New Zealand, get yourself to one of these shows.
Exhumed are bringing the carnage back down under.
EXHUMED Australia and New Zealand Tour 2026
Wednesday 27 May, Whammy, Auckland NZ with Anoxia
Thursday 28 May, Valhalla, Wellington NZ with Anoxia
Sunday 31 May, Perth Dethfest 2026, The Rosemount, Perth with Ashen, Earth Rot, Crypt Crawler and more
Wednesday 3 June, Ed Castle, Adelaide with Ashen
Thursday 4 June, Crowbar, Brisbane with Ashen
Friday 5 June, Singing Bird Studios, Frankston with Ashen
Saturday 6 June, Stay Gold, Melbourne with Ashen
Sunday 7 June, Sydney Dethfest 2026, Crowbar, Sydney, co headline with Origin, plus Ashen, Anoxia and more
Monday 8 June, The Baso, Canberra with Ashen, Anoxia and Munitions
Tickets available now:
https://yourmatebookings.com/tours/exhumed-aus-and-nz-2026/
Red Asphalt is out now via Relapse Records.
