Poland's Decapitated need no introduction, their first album, Winds of Creation, having been released some 21 years ago. The First Damned predates that, as it is a compilation of demo materials from the late '90s. They were roughly 18 years old when their debut was released, so even younger when this stuff was recorded.

For a gathering of demos recordings, this is surprisingly good quality. Good enough that, if you didn't know it, you'd think this is just like any other album. This is pretty raw stuff, as one might expect, but pretty much everything here sounds relatively good, with no crappy-sounding stuff just thrown in there, so I found The First Damned very listenable from beginning to end and overall this flows pretty well, which is no mean feat for some 46 minutes of recordings done at different times. This is something that fans of the band are bound to enjoy, but newcomers who don't mind a less-polished (no pun intended) delivery of pure death metal will surely get a kick out of this as well.