ninehertz

Dead Neanderthals have been a bunch of free-thinking, genre-expanding weirdos for so long now (the oldest of their 50+ releases on bandcamp is from 2010) nothing they can come up with will be a surprise. They are not so much multi-faceted as dodecahedron-faced, never knowing what the next roll will bring, other than its unpredictability. But they still have the capacity for awe, as here on Flesh is Fragile.

The eclectic Dutch experimentalists have confounded regularly, often wowing the listener in the process, but maybe never more than here. For this record, they take an industrial form, with throbbing pulsations, wild synths and electro beats, managing to make it feel as intense as extreme metal without an overreliance upon guitars, in a manner that will be familiar to fans of The Body.

What could be a cold exterior, with its mechanical crunching turns and static scarred atmospheres, is instead wholly addictive. Your senses are frequently overpowered by these frigid, barren ingredients yet somehow, they inject an emotional pull that is hard to resist. That you form such warm kinship with an album that has, on the track Hollowed-Out Existence, a sampled voice repeating “today, I will not kill myself” within overbearing industrial that blots out the sky, tells you everything.

It is intense yet hypnotic, a buzzing migraine of misanthropic noise yet adorned with bewitching charms. That Dead Neanderthals still hold the power to push outwardly and create music as good as anything they’ve created prior is a wonder; experimentation must be good for the aging process. Everything they try their hand at, every abrupt directional switch, they succeed.