By 1989 when this album came out on Vinyl Solutions and quickly circulated around Europe,
Macabre had been in existence for a few years and had developed their sound beyond the proto-death metal found on their shoddy debut,
Grim Reality. Not by any means is
Gloom a masterpiece and may not even warrant the status of being a landmark album -- if anything, it's simply an important album. Like
Grim Reality, the music on
Gloom isn't exactly genius, and it's hard to get past the murky production, yet one must once again consider how pioneering such brutally fast music and such perverse lyrics were for it only being 1989. By being a template for the evolving death metal genre,
Gloom awarded
Macabre a cult following, and it also set the stage for the group's eventual breakthrough with
Sinister Slaughter [The original version was released on Vinyl Solutions in 1989, who then re-released the album on CD with tracks from
Grim Reality in 1990; Decomposed then re-released
Gloom in the late '90s].