San Francisco Bay Area, multi-instrumentalist, producer and vocalist Andrew Lee (Azath, Draghkar, Houkago Grind Time, et al) spent his formative years woodshedding in his home studio, putting together piece by piece a Swedish-infused take on the grinding fury of Terrorizer mixed with the raw, plodding onslaught of early Bolt Thrower. From those years of tone and riff worship, RIPPED TO SHREDS was born.

With an eye towards the guitar work of Grind god Jesse Pintado and the more virtuosic, Dave Suzuki-inspired elements of the death/grind pantheon, Lee looked to represent his Chinese/Taiwanese heritage in RIPPED TO SHREDS through lyrics that tell the tales of the tempestuous and war-ridden history of the Chinese sphere.

From the band’s first full-length, Mai Zang (Tomb, 2018), Lee broke new lyrical ground, bringing to light such trials, tragedies, and triumphs as the flooding of the Yellow River to stop the advance of Japanese troops in 1938, or the purge of communists by Nationalist forces during the Chinese Civil War.

These pieces of history are brought to life via the chaotic, metallic backdrop born of Lee’s obsessive musicianship and world-class production work, both of which have evolved to new heights over the course of three full-length albums. Mai Zang was followed closely by Luan (2020), and Jubian (2022), with Lee presenting Chinese history via the medium of Death Metal from the perspective of someone whose ancestors were actually there.

2024 sees the RIPPED TO SHREDS return with their highly anticipated new album, Sanshi. The band explodes out of the underground with all the blood-soaked hallmarks of the hellacious RIPPED TO SHREDS sound - an onslaught of frenetic dueling solos, blasting drums, and van Drunen-esque vocals that further fuse the grit and grime of old school Death Metal and Grind with the here and now.

Sanshi’s lead single “Perverting the Funeral Rites,” sees the quartet at their most fierce and focused, in a song inspired by obscure funeral rites in Taiwan wherein exotic dancers perform lithe rituals for living and dead alike.

The album as a whole sees the band dig into a morbid fixation on death and the afterlife in traditional Chinese folklore. “Force Fed” delves into the legend of Meng Po’s “Elixir of Forgetfulness”, which when drunk by the dead wipes their memories clean before they are reborn into their next incarnation. Elsewhere, “Living In Effigy” was inspired by real life tales of photographers traversing remote rural China, taking funeral portraits of the elderly there who had died alone, while their only living relatives lived far-away, in one of the country’s countless megalopolises.

Sanshi's cover art comes courtesy of Lee’s long-term collaborator, artist Guang Yang, and depicts a scene of Yan Luo Wang, The God of Hell, and the dead who must face his judgment in his demonic court.