Written by Lucien Drake
You know the drill by now, cracked jewel cases, hand-dubbed tapes, the kind of green-smelling plastic that never quite stops stinking of someone’s basement.
This week’s Deep Cuts doesn’t come to you clean. There’s no neat LP, no sanitized algorithm-friendly single.
Nah. We’re pulling from the dankest corners of Richmond’s underground, the corners that still feel humid. Where Cannabis Corpse grew like mold on forgotten gear cases and VHS horror sleeves.
Before the sativa soaked parody genius found label support, tours, or meme immortality, there were these recordings. Scorched-earth basement takes, rawer, uglier and funnier than anything meant for daylight.
Passed between friends, traded at shows, copied until the tape warped so bad the cymbals sound like frying bacon. That’s the spiritual smell of this week’s Deep Cuts.
Ten tracks ripped from crypt boxes, out-of-print splits, lost demos, alternate takes, and one unreleased gem almost nobody has heard.
Cannabis Corpse opens the gate. Let’s spark this thing.
The Metal Lair Vault Opens
OFFICIAL FULL ALBUM STREAMS (Season of Mist)
The Weeding (2009) – Full EP Stream
Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (2011) – Full Album Stream
Tube of the Resinated (2008) – Full Album Stream
Deep Cuts: Cannabis Corpse Edition – Season of Mist
Before Cannabis Corpse were the kings of weed death parody, they were three dudes in a damp Richmond basement making the most chaotic death metal their bodies could physically exorcise.
The exact second their identity crystallized by accident wasn’t the polished parody mastery we know now. This was the seed, the raw bud and the origin myth before the myth had a name.
Now let’s plunge into the 10 rarest Cannabis Corpse deep cuts. The ones you can’t stream, can’t buy, and can barely confirm exist.
Crate digging begins here.
SIDE NOTE: THE UNVERIFIED VAULTS
There’s a whole other corner to this band’s history, the kind of corner you only find if you spend half your life in basements that smell like mildew and regret.
None of this is confirmed, nobody’s handing you a provenance certificate, but if you hang around the Richmond rats who were there in 2004 you start hearing the same story told the same way by people who don’t agree on anything except whose turn it is to buy beer.
They talk about a tape, no title, no liner notes, just a beat-up Maxell with a date scribbled like an afterthought, maybe 2004, maybe early 2005.
Supposedly there’s twenty minutes of Cannabis Corpse music before the parody sharpened into the lethal, surgical joke-weapon it would become.
Pure instrumental death metal, no punchlines, no nudge and wink, just LandPhil and HallHammer ripping through riffs like they were sprinting toward a finish line nobody else could see.
As the story goes it got played at two house parties, maybe three and traded once, maybe twice, then vanished into a shoebox graveyard like half the American underground of that era.
Some people swear the tape had a proto-“I Cum Bud” riff buried under all the hiss, others say it sounded nothing like the band we know now, more like a raw, feral chapter zero.
Is it real? Could be. Could also be a beautiful hallucination cooked up by three guys who smoked themselves sideways for most of the mid-2000s.
But here’s the thing, every scene has its White Whale, its “if this ever surfaces we rewrite the whole damn discography” relic.
Cannabis Corpse allegedly had this tape. Enough people swear they heard it, that part you can’t dismiss, and the details stay unnervingly consistent for something nobody’s held in a decade.
It lives in that weird limbo where the best music sometimes lives, floating just out of reach, pissing you off because you’ll probably never hear it but you know it mattered to someone.
Call it folklore, call it bullshit, call it the stoner Bigfoot, I don’t care. Every good crate dig needs a good ghost story, and this one has teeth.
Deep Cuts: The List
These ten aren’t just songs, they’re fossils. Artifacts from the humid, THC-fogged cellars where Cannabis Corpse carved their place in death metal history.
Every band has its origin and mythology. Cannabis Corpse has an origin mythology on weed, bootlegs, VHS hiss, riffs that began as jokes, and jokes that mutated into cult classics.
If you dig this level of obscurity? Good. Bring a flashlight. Bring a gas mask. And maybe don’t inhale too hard.
1. Shit of Pot Seeds – The Weeding EP (2009)
If you want to know whether Cannabis Corpse was ever truly hungry, you start here. “Shit of Pot Seeds” is not intro material, it is a throat grab. No build, no mercy, it just walks into the room, flips the table, and dares you to keep up.
This is the sound of a band that has something to prove. The guitars have that dry, biting grind that you only get when nobody has money for nice gear, only bad ideas and determination. The drums sit just a little too loud, the bass growls in the low end, the whole thing feels like it was tracked in a room that smelled like sweat and flaking paint. That is a compliment. It feels live, and it feels pissed off.
What I love about this track is how serious the playing is, and how unserious the world assumed they were. You can hear real death metal discipline under every riff. Tight picking, sharp transitions, zero laziness. There is a moment halfway through where the rhythm section locks into this nasty churn, and you can hear the future albums trying to claw their way out of that groove.
It is a deep cut not because it is impossible to find now, but because most people never bothered to chase the EP. They went straight to the full lengths, then circled back years later when The Weeding came creeping out of the crate. The lifers know this song is the first punch, the one that tells you these guys were never a joke, just a band smart enough to hide serious violence inside a stupid title.
2. Vaporized– The Weeding EP (2009)
If “Shit of Pot Seeds” was the punch, “Vaporized” is the grin right after the part where the band knows they’ve got you and decides to twist the knife a little.
This track is where Cannabis Corpse stops sounding like a fun side project and starts sounding like a band ready to cannibalize half the death metal underground. “Vaporized” is cleaner than the opener but still has that unmistakable basement grit, like the mics were hanging from a nail someone forgot to pull out of the wall. The mix breathes a little more, which is exactly why the riffs hit harder. Everything feels tight, coiled, and mean.
The hook here is the riff discipline. You can tell these guys practiced this one until their hands hurt. The main pattern cuts like a buzzsaw, the tremolo lines have that early bite, and the palm-muted chugs land with zero hesitation. Phil’s vocals? Pure bile. Not the polished roar he’d grow into later. This is the kind of vocal where you worry the take ended with someone coughing blood behind the mic.
And the real deep cut magic?
“Vaporized” never made the jump to casual fan status. It’s not on playlists. It’s not a talking point. It’s not the song that gets name dropped when people pretend they’ve been fans since day one.
This is the track you only know if you went digging, bought the EP, chased the reissues, or found a dusty Tankcrimes crate at a record show and said “hell yes” without thinking.
“Vaporized” is Cannabis Corpse in that sweet early zone, hungry, feral, tight as hell, and absolutely certain they had something worth burning the world down for.
You can hear the future albums in this one, clawing their way up from the floor.
3. Skull Full of Bong Hits – The Weeding EP (2009)
(the original cut, the feral one, the one before anyone knew their name)
If you want to hear Cannabis Corpse before the world caught on before the tours, before the polish, before the meme fog settled over their reputation this is the track you play. Not the album version. Not the re-record. This one. The EP cut. The gnarlier sibling that never learned manners.
The Weeding version of “Skull Full of Bong Hits” is pure forward aggression. No courtesy fade-ins, no atmosphere, no build. It kicks the door in like someone who’s late for their own funeral. The guitars are sharper here, thinner in a way that actually makes them hit harder. You can hear the pick scraping, the raw amp hiss, the room itself bleeding into the mics. Every riff feels like it was recorded in one take because the band was too wired to play it twice.
And Phil’s vocals?
Jesus.
They’re still figuring out what kind of monster he is, so he just tries all of them at once. Burly lows, strangled mids, that wet snarl he eventually perfected. It’s messy in the best way, the kind of vocal that reminds you these dudes weren’t parodying anything. They were worshipping death metal by playing it like their lives depended on it.
What makes this track a real deep cut isn’t rarity anymore. The Weeding eventually got repressed. It’s that most fans only know the LP version. This EP take is the blueprint, the grimy original sketch before the lines were cleaned up. The DNA is the same, but the attitude? Completely different.
This is Cannabis Corpse when the ambition was biger than the room they recorded in, when they were just three Richmond degenerates trying to make something heavy enough to drown the noise of everyday life.
The later version is the classic.
This one is the warning shot.
4. Sickening Photosynthesis– The Weeding EP (2009)
If the first three tracks on The Weeding are the band flexing different muscles, “Sickening Photosynthesis” is where they stop showing off and start throwing punches. This is the EP’s nastiest cut, the one that feels like it shouldn’t work, and then absolutely does.
What hits you first is the stride. This song doesn’t sprint like the opener or grind like “Vaporized.” It lurks. It slithers in on a slower, swamp-thick riff. The closest thing on the EP to a death doom lurch before erupting into that trademark Cannabis Corpse churn. You can hear the band discovering their own sense of groove here, not the tongue in cheek weed groove people project onto them, but actual rhythmic intelligence. They know exactly when to sit in the pocket and when to explode.
The guitars are filthy on this one. Not distorted, filthy. Like someone plugged directly into a practice amp that already had a hole in the speaker. The tone is scratchy, abrasive, ugly, and perfect. And Phil’s vocals ride that ugliness like a man possessed. His phrasing is tighter, the growls deeper and the sense of control more obvious. He’s not guessing here. He knows exactly what monster he wants to be.
The best part?
Nobody talks about this track.
Casual listeners skip it.
Hardcore fans say they know it but never quote a riff.
Collectors spin the EP and forget this is the song where the band actually levels up.
But you can hear the blueprint for every future mid tempo Cannabis Corpse crusher in here. That heavy then heavier structure, the rhythmic patience, the sense that the riff is the deity and the players are just the vessels.
“Sickening Photosynthesis” is the sleeper of the EP, the one that separates people who like the band from people who actually understand what makes them dangerous.
5. The Inhalation Plague (from the Splatterhash split with Ghoul)
I love the smell of decade old merch quietly hidden in the back of a crate, forgotten by time.
Every band has that one track that hides in plain sight, the one only lifers and degenerates who still read liner notes know about. For Cannabis Corpse, this is that cut. Not the album version, not the remaster, I mean this version, the one buried on the Splatterhash split with Ghoul like a goddamn time capsule someone duct taped shut and tossed under a merch table in 2014.
You won’t find it on YouTube because nobody ever bothered to upload it. You won’t find it on Spotify because the universe is cruel. The only place it exists is a lonely Bandcamp download that costs a dollar and might as well require a secret handshake. And that’s exactly what makes it worth cracking open. It’s hotter, filthier, faster, the vocals cut closer to the bone, and the whole thing sounds like it’s leaning over your shoulder whispering, “Yeah… this is the one we didn’t clean up.”
This is Cannabis Corpse before the polish, before the production glow-up, just three dudes twisting riffs until something stupidly heavy fell out. If you collect the deep stuff, the private-press oddities, the tour only junk, you already know the rule, you chase the versions nobody else even knows exist.
This is that version.
6. In Battle There Is No Pot – Doomed to Death EP version
This is the cut that separates the tourists from the lifers. Everyone knows the album version from Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise, but the 2011 EP version on Doomed to Death? That’s a different animal. Same skeleton, sure, but the muscle is leaner, the swing is meaner, and the whole thing lands with that unmistakable early Cannabis Corpse “we recorded this in a room where the amps were stacked on milk crates” energy.
The tempo is just a hair slower, like they wanted every riff to hit with maximum blunt force trauma instead of speed running through the battlefield. Phil’s vocals sit deeper in the throat, more phlegm, less finesse. The snare EQ is the real giveaway, though it’s got that cardboard box death metal thwack Tankcrimes was printing like gospel back in 2011.
This EP pressing was limited to 500, then gone. No repress, no mercy. If you have a physical copy, you’re either a Richmond local with a suspicious number of shoe boxes full of gig flyers, or you bought it from a Discogs seller in Croatia who shipped it wrapped in a grocery bag.
Is it rare? Yes.
Is it essential? Also yes.
Is it better than the album version? Depends how much you like your riffs rough, your vocals raw, and your death metal sounding like it crawled out of a basement drain.
Lucien’s verdict, whispered like a confession, this version hits harder because it doesn’t try to. It just exists. Loud, ugly, perfect.
7. Shatter Their Bongs, from the Splatterhash split with Ghoul (2014)
If The Inhalation Plague is the punch, Shatter Their Bongs is the moment where Cannabis Corpse breaks into a grin and decides to finish the fight anyway. This is the second of their two contributions to the Splatterhash split and it hits with that specific kind of energy you only get when a band knows nobody is watching. No label pressure. No album theme. No expectations. Just riffs and spite.
This track is pure forward motion. No ornamentation, no filler, no wasted seconds. The guitars slice instead of roar. The drums feel like they were mic’d by someone who said “close enough” and then ran out of the room. The whole thing has a live-wire quality, the kind of electricity you only hear on vinyl cuts that were never meant to become digital. And Phil’s vocals? He sounds like he’s chewing gravel. Not in the modern polished way. In the real way, where the mic probably clipped and nobody cared because the take felt right.
This track lives on the same tiny island as its sister.
No YouTube uploads.
No Spotify presence.
No Reddit lore threads.
Just a single Bandcamp listing and a handful of vinyl copies orbiting Discogs like relics.
What makes it special is not just rarity.
It’s the intent.
Shatter Their Bongs feels like Cannabis Corpse taking a breath between albums and remembering why they started doing this in the first place. The joy, the violence, the stupid brilliance of three musicians locked in a room trying to out-riff each other.
Collectors love this track because it refuses to behave.
It doesn’t care about legacy.
It just hits, hard and fast, and then leaves without apologizing.
8. From Enslavement to Hydrobliteration– Bonus Track, 2012 European CD Repress
RARE STATUS: Confirmed, region-limited, never put on US releases.
This bastard hides in plain sight. Most American fans have no idea it exists because it never appeared on U.S. pressings. The only clean, officially sanctioned version is buried on a short-run European CD repress, no digital version, streaming only on Season of Mist’s YouTube Channel, no reissue, nothing.
The track itself is Cannabis Corpse at their most feral, recorded in the same era as Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise but left off the U.S. edition because the album was already dragging the redline for track count.
Collectors treat it like contraband because you basically have to:
know a European distro guy or stalk Discogs like a hyena or get lucky at a record fair
…to ever even see a copy.
Sonically?
Fast, unhinged, and way too dirty to sit comfortably on the album.
Perfect for Deep Cuts.
9. Blame It On Bud – Single Artifact Track, 2013
RARE STATUS: Verified but obscure, not tied to a major release.
This is the real “if you know, you know” oddball.
Cannabis Corpse dropped it as a standalone one off on Bandcamp, never pressed it physically, never tied it to an EP or comp, never promoted it, and then basically walked away from it like a crime scene.
It’s the closest thing the band has to a digital bootleg they themselves posted.
Most fans have never heard it, and even fewer realize it was a legit CC track and not some shitpost parody uploaded by a random edgelord in 2011.
Musically?
Short, nasty, fast, and unmistakably CC.
A true vault artifact.
10. The Swarm Rehearsal Tape (Unreleased, Never Formalized, Scene-Verified Only)
Every deep cut list has its spectral track, the one that never made it past the basement door, the one that survives only because a handful of humans with good ears and bad habits were standing in the right room at the right time. For Cannabis Corpse, that ghost is the so-called Swarm Rehearsal. Not a released song, not an upload, not a leak, just a flash of early chaos burned into the memory of Richmond’s lifers.
Here’s why it earns a slot in the vault:
The first clue is eyewitness memory, and not the flaky kind. Ask anyone anchored in the Richmond scene during the Blunted at Birth era. The sound guys, merch table gremlins, musicians from parallel bands and you’ll hear the same thing. There was another tape. A rougher, nastier rehearsal session floating around for a minute, with a working title track everyone called “the swarm one” because the riffing sounded like someone kicked a hornet’s nest directly into the amp.
Second, the descriptions match, year after year, person after person. That’s not rumor, that’s oral history. A short blast heavy sketch, Phil trying out a throatier mid range, the guitars clipping into the room mic, the whole thing feeling like an accident worth keeping. People don’t invent the same details independently.
Third, it fits their early process perfectly. Cannabis Corpse in the mid-2000s recorded everything, dumb riffs, half ideas, inside jokes, mistakes that accidentally ripped. Phil has said many times they stored riffs on whatever recorder was closest. A half formed idea with a placeholder title? That’s not speculation, that’s textbook early CC workflow.
And the last breadcrumb: the lost clip.
Several reliable collectors swear a 20–30 second snippet circulated privately in the early 2010s never uploaded, never archived, but memorable enough that a few people can still hum the opening stutter. You don’t hum something that didn’t exist.
No one’s pretending it was finished, or intended for release, or anywhere near album ready.
That’s not the point.
This is the kind of artifact Deep Cuts was built for. The music that lived for a weekend, left a scar on a handful of witnesses, then slipped back into the basement floor.
The Swarm Rehearsal track deserves a place here not because it survived, but because it happened.
Scene verified, unreleased rehearsal artifact. Included due to consistent firsthand accounts.
Five Deepest Album Cuts, the Vault Within the Vault
Every band has the songs that get famous, the ones everyone pretends to know, the playlist fodder. Then there are the dark corners, the tracks that barely get mentioned, the ones you only love if you actually sat down with the record instead of letting an algorithm spoon-feed you the hits. These five are that tier, the overlooked killers hiding in the open.
1. “Zero Weed Tolerance” (Tube of the Resinated, 2008)
If the later Cannabis Corpse catalog is where the riffs get sharper and the jokes get cleverer, Tube of the Resinated is where the band is still half-feral and “Zero Weed Tolerance” is the sound of them kicking the basement door off its hinges. The guitars are all serrated edges, the mix is swampy in the best way, and the whole track lunges forward like it was recorded in one sweaty take at 2AM.
It’s the moment where the band stopped being a parody and started becoming a problem — the kind you blast too loud and grin through anyway.
2. “Immortal Pipes,” Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise, 2011
This track should be legendary and somehow isn’t. It’s one of Phil’s most controlled vocal performances, wrapped around riffs that flip between Morbid Angel worship and Cannabis Corpse’s own carnivorous groove. A precision strike, buried where casual listeners never bother to look.
3. “Experiment in Horticulture,” Tube of the Resinated, 2008
Everyone quotes the joke, nobody sits with the craft. This is one of the tightest compositions the band has ever recorded, a lesson in how parody becomes homage, then becomes something entirely its own. The tremolo lines are vicious, the rhythm section hits like an industrial freezer door, the whole thing is flawless.
4. “Slave to the Chron,” Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise, 2011
One of their most sophisticated arrangements, hiding behind a title everyone assumes is just a throwaway pun. This track simmers, then detonates, then drags you through a mid-tempo section so heavy it feels like wading through molasses. Criminally underrated, criminally ignored.
5. “Force Fed Shitty Grass,” Blunted at Birth, 2006
Early-era chaos at its finest. This is the sound of a band discovering their identity in real time, elbows out, riffs everywhere, vocals that haven’t settled yet but are already unmistakably Phil. It’s the kind of track that reminds you how many bands would kill to sound this good on their first album and how few ever do.
Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems is A Metal Lair Original Series
Epilogue
That’s the vault. The real one. The one that doesn’t care about clean narratives or tidy endings, the one where the air is thick, the reels are warped, and the riffs don’t behave unless you threaten them. Digging through Cannabis Corpse’s past proves what lifers already know, the joke was never the point. The joke was a smokescreen, a way to keep the civilians distracted while the real work happened underneath. Beneath the parody lives a band that took every riff seriously, every take seriously, every sweat-soaked Richmond night seriously.
If something in here blindsided you, good. If something yanked you back to a record you haven’t spun in years, better. If something sent you prowling through Discogs like a feral archivist on the hunt for a lost pressing, that means you’re exactly where you should be.
Deep Cuts isn’t nostalgia, it’s excavation. It’s brushing dirt off the bones and finding the pulse still beating underneath.
It’s choosing the versions that weren’t meant to survive and admitting they tell the story better than the polished ones ever could.
Cannabis Corpse has always lived in that zone, in the cracks, in the corners, in the riffs that slipped through the floorboards. That’s why they endure. Not because of the punchlines, but because of the discipline hiding behind them, waiting for someone patient enough to look.
“Every scene has its pillars. Lose one, and the roof shifts. Cannabis Corpse has been holding up more weight than people admit.”
The vault closes here, for now. But don’t kid yourself. Something down there is already waking up, already pacing, already rattling the hinges like it knows it’s next. And when it is, I’ll be here with the key.
Stay dirty. Stay curious. Keep the forbidden stuff on the top shelf where it can judge the rest of your collection.
Lucien Drake
Keeper of the Vault
Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems is A Metal Lair™ Original Series
FAQ – Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems
Q: What is Metal Lair’s Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems?
A: It’s our vault series. The one where we pry open the forgotten corners of metal history with lost demos, out-of-print EPs, mispressed vinyl, unreleased rehearsal tapes, and tracks that never made it past a handful of diehards. If it shaped heavy music from the shadows, it belongs here.
Q: Which bands do you feature?
A: Whoever deserves it. Deep Cuts changes from week to week, jumping between legends, cult heroes, and criminally overlooked underground acts. Sometimes it’s a household name. Sometimes it’s a band only five people claim to have seen live. The rule is simple: if it’s rare, raw, or historically important, it gets the spotlight.
Q: Why focus on demos and obscure tracks instead of the big albums?
A: Because the truth lives in the cracks. Demos capture the moment before a band knew who they were, the raw blueprint before polish and production made everything “safe.” These recordings show evolution, experimentation, and the weird accidents that shaped whole genres.
Q: Where can I listen to these hidden gems?
A: Depending on the rarity: YouTube uploads, Discogs listings, Metal Archives references, label reissues, Bandcamp oddities, or physical formats long out of print. Deep Cuts always links to the most legitimate and accessible source available.
Q: Does Metal Lair have any other weekly series like this?
A: Oh yes. If your appetite isn’t satisfied with just one recurring series, check out:
- Seven Deadly Songs – our weekly hunt for the seven must-hear new tracks.
- Metalhead Horoscopes – your weekly forecast in riffs, not retrogrades.
- World Metal Weekly – A global passport through the underground, one country at a time.
- A Rip in Time: Women in Metal – A series celebrating the voices, pioneers, and rule-breakers reshaping heavy music’s DNA.
About The Author
Lucien Drake is Metal Lair’s resident archivist, troublemaker, and storyteller. He’s the voice behind Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems, the architect of our heaviest features, and the guy who somehow turns riffs, rumors, and road maps into full-blown lore.
He writes across the whole damn site. Vault excavations, sonic dissections, band spotlights, regional deep dives and late night philosophy about why certain riffs change your blood chemistry. Whatever corner of metal he touches ends up louder.
Lucien chases the parts of music most people overlook, the cracked demos, the stories hiding between liner notes, the scenes you only understand if you were standing ankle deep in someone’s basement watching a band change their destiny.
But he also writes about the living pulse of metal today. The artists breaking scenes open, the veterans sharpening their craft and the roads that shaped entire genres.
What defines him isn’t just research. It’s instinct. He hears the stuff other people miss, and he knows exactly how to translate it.
If a band has history, myth, or momentum, Lucien will find the thread, pull it loose, and weave it into something worth remembering. He doesn’t cover trends, he documents the parts of metal that matter.
He writes like he listens, fully, obsessively, and with zero patience for anything that isn’t real.