#thoughteater

Given current socio-political conditions, in the US and elsewhere, the flip answer to that is: We should be so lucky. But no such consolations seem to be in the offing. Perhaps, then, the dissonant, kvlty black metal Délirant creates is what’s needed, as the soundtrack to decline, violence and mounting cultural chaos. Lots of black metal acts have been actively inviting precisely that sort of social phenomena. Some bands (the now largely disappeared Cascadian variety, the more radical of the RABM acts) do so as outraged reporters on humanity’s insufficiency to itself and to its capacity to manage existence on our increasingly distressed earthball. Other black metal acts (the satanic, the cynically misanthropic, the race-baiters and corpse-painted trollish types) have done so with a sort of mordant or mean-spirited joy. Swell.

“Mordant” and “mean-spirited” are modifiers accurately applied to one of DB’s other solo projects, the nasty, raw-punk-inflected Hässlig, which mostly recently issued its Apex Predator tape. Elsewhere this reviewer noted discomfort with some of the project’s semiotics: the recourse to Germanic language alongside of titles like “Slaves” and “Watch Them Hang.” Maybe it’s just button-pushing, maybe it’s sharp-edged irony. But when Alternative for Deutschland is ascendant and Elon Musk is telling right-wing Germans to stop acknowledging the weight of their very particular history, irony isn’t a particularly potent weapon — even from the relative distance of Valencia, DB’s home province in Spain. And maybe it’s just these ears, but when this reviewer hears Délirant’s guitar tone and angularity, he conjures the shape and textures of middle-period releases from Deathspell Omega, über button-pushers and players of peek-a-boo with fascists. It doesn’t help that DB claims Bone Awl and Ildjarn as primary sonic influences for Hässlig.

So: 2025 and we are still fussing over nationalisms and fascism in black metal and adjacent subgenres in heavy music. It’s tired stuff. Your reviewer is a tired man, tapped out by anxiety and rage and his own resentments. The kicker? I really, really like Apex Predator and enjoy, to a somewhat lesser extent, Thoughteater’s friction and dissonance. Sometimes it would be swell to stop questioning, digging on the effing internet and worrying over the implied politics of what’s spinning through the tape deck’s heads or buzzing through the Bluetooth speakers. Maybe it would be nice to take the edge off, to let the thoughteater suck away on all that ambient fear and twitchy thinking. But it won’t help the earthball, or the cultures churning their way toward idiocy and extinction.