The Estonian band Thunraz, the solo project of Madis Jalakas, has been in a creative surge from its inception, releasing a pair of EPs and a pair of albums since 2018. If anything the surge has strengthened, because Thunraz is following its latest album Revelation (released about five months ago) with yet another album that comes out today, on CD and digital formats.
The new album is entitled Borderline, and it includes nine songs, one of which — “You and Me” — we premiered a few weeks ago, along with a head-spinning red-shifted video. Today, of course, we’ve got all of it for you.
Across these nine songs the lyrics make for relentlessly difficult reading. In bitter, hateful, but sometimes eloquent terms, they speak of such things as betrayal and distrust, of depravity and deceit, of child abuse and suicide, of rage as inevitable and grief as a momentary reprieve, of an endless cycle of dying and living only to die again, of a self that seems imprisoned except only in dreams, of life as a rigged game which offers no way forward and no way out but one.
(We don’t know for sure, but maybe the album’s title is intended to capture a life perpetually on the borderline between living and wanting to end life.)
The lyrics also often make for difficult listening. Jalakas expels them in brutal death metal growls that betray no remorse, but without warning then explode into blood-spraying screams. Even when he sings (and he does so often), the tones are often haunting and dismal, sometimes bringing to mind a gloomy style of post-punk.
As dark as the lyrics are, and as harrowing as the vocals also are, the music often is too. The album opener “Monument“, for example, greets the listener with ruthless, skull-smashing hammer blows and dissonant tones of agony, and then starts furiously jackhamering the spine and emitting abrasive fretwork contortions that grow increasingly demented and swarming, and seem to writhe in misery.
The clubbing and clobbering percussive assaults and bowel-rumbling bass notes are key features in most of the songs, and they’re as electrifying and muscle-moving as they are brutalizing, while the corrosive dissonance of the riffing, the unsettling squirm of the guitar-leads, and the unpredictable ways in which they morph, also persist.
Some of the songs, such as “Serenity” (where the singing is paramount), bring darkness in near-hallucinatory experiences, but honestly, the intricate but bizarre fretwork permutations and the wailing singing give almost all of the songs a hallucinatory cast.
The bouncing beats and gravel-toned near-atonal growling of the bass in “Weight of Time“, for example, unpredictably start and stop, and the guitar blurts in screeches and moans as if lost, and the effect is very disorienting.
But as the expression of a worldview that’s so inhospitably damaged and bleak, the music isn’t as relentlessly grim as you might think. Maybe the music is the catharsis for the daily catastrophes, or even their antidote. Maybe it will be for you too.
And so “Rictus“, to pick an example, displays lots of angular and swirling fretwork that’s undeniably freakish and yet strangely exultant, and the barrage of “You and Me” is as head-spinning and mind-melting as it is sinister (a different kind of deep and ominous singing has a lot to do with why it’s so sinister).
Songs like those contrast with others such as “The Line“, which is the most musically despairing of them all. There, the inventiveness of the drumwork still seizes attention, but still doesn’t detract from the abject wailing misery and whining agony of the guitars.
On the other hand, “The Line” makes a startling change before it ends, yielding the spotlight to the near-crystalline ring of a prog-influenced guitar solo, somewhat psychedelic but wholly captivating.
Fittingly, because this album is all about spinning heads in different ways, that’s followed by the closer “Nihil“, which might be the most violently deranged of all the songs — a convulsion of bullet-spitting drums, maniacally writhing and swarming riffage, and the hair-on-fire screaming of a soul that’s reached the limits of its tolerance in an awful world.
Taking stock of all this, one might be tempted to fashion a hybrid-genre label for Borderline that’s something like brutal dissonant avant-garde industrial death metal. Or maybe you’ll come up with something else after you hear it — and now you can hear it:
ORDER:
https://thunraz.bandcamp.com/album/borderline
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https://www.facebook.com/thunrazmetal