What Is Dissonant Death Metal, Anyway?

Whatever it is, these four bands make it

Nightmarer, a dissonant death metal band

I haven’t done one in a little while, so let’s start this week’s free newsletter with a… Montana Update!

My neighbors — not my next-door neighbors, but some people living close by — have cows. Their house is on a hill across the highway from me, and I can walk out my front door in the morning and look across the road and see the whole herd, including some moms and calves, walking around on the hillside eating grass. When we drive down the road that leads to the grocery store, the post office, the Mexican restaurant, the bank, and all the other places we visit regularly (it’s a small town), we go right past the property and sometimes the cows are on the grass, and sometimes they’re resting under the tall pine trees that are also part of his large patch of land. Forest cows.

Like most children of the suburbs, I find cows very pleasing in their placidity and seeming contentment. Especially since there are relatively few of them, perhaps a couple of dozen at most. I haven’t counted. But it’s clear that these folks aren’t running some kind of vast, reeking, industrial stockyard. They just have some cows, and the cows have it pretty good as far as I can tell. They walk around freely, can sit under the trees when it’s too hot, and are left alone to bond with their calves. The sight of them — much like the sight of the pair of hawks that circles over the expanse of grass behind my apartment every day between 4 and 5 PM — relaxes me and makes me happy.

Something else that makes me happy: there is a really good Asian fusion food truck within walking distance of my apartment. They’re only open four days a week (people around here know how to work-life balance) and I go there about once a week. The last time I went, which was maybe my fifth or sixth visit, the woman who handles the money while her husband cooks greeted me by name. I am officially a Regular, and glad to be one.

This has been our Montana Update. And now, to our primary subject: dissonant death metal.

I’ve been listening to metal for 40 years. I don’t know how I first heard their music, I think I saw the video for “Heading Out to the Highway” from Point of Entry at the home of a friend who had cable and therefore MTV, but I was able to talk my dad into buying me a clutch of Judas Priest albums starting when I was around 11. (He probably acquiesced because my parents were getting divorced at the time.) He took me to my first metal concert, too: Dio, with Accept opening, at Madison Square Garden in 1986.

I’ve been writing about metal for almost as long as I’ve been listening, first in my high school newspaper and almost everywhere I’ve been published since. At one outlet in particular, Alternative Press, admitting to an interest in metal got me pegged as “the metal guy,” and generated a steady flow of assignments, up to and including cover stories on Slipknot and Disturbed. I was even the editor of a metal magazine for almost two years. And in all that time, I’ve become very familiar with the language of metal — the way bands, fans, record labels, and publicists talk about the music, and the way they subdivide it into ever narrower and more specific subgenres. Blackened thrash. Depressive black metal. Grindcore, which is very different from powerviolence even though 95% of outsiders would say they sound identical. Goregrind and pornogrind. Funeral doom. Brutal technical death metal, which is never to be confused with merely technical death metal. Etc., etc., etc.

Lately, I’ve seen a new sub-subgenre popping up: dissonant death metal. Now, I know what death metal is; I’ve been listening to it since about 1991 (which makes me somewhat late to the party, I know). And I have enough Sonic Youth records that I know what dissonance is. But dissonant death metal is a new one on me. Still, one of the cardinal rules of journalism, almost as important as “If the headline is in the form of a question, the answer is ‘No’”, is that three is a trend. And in the past few months I have come across not three but four excellent albums which were classified in the press release or on the label website as “dissonant death metal.” So we’re gonna talk about all four, and see if we can sort out some common factors.

Devenial Verdict are from Finland and have existed since 2006. They released two five-song EPs, Corpus and Soulthirst, in 2014 and 2016; I haven’t heard either one. Then they signed with Transcending Obscurity, an excellent label based out of India (three of the four albums in this newsletter are TO releases), and released Ash Blind, their full-length debut album, in October 2022. Their music is less dissonant, to my ear, than harmonically unconventional. Their riffs hit with a big crunch, like a drill press punching through a car’s engine block, and are often punctuated with squealing pinch harmonics, and vocalist Riku Saressalo has a hoarse, blast-furnace roar that when he really strives for melody can sound a little bit like Joe Duplantier of Gojira at his harshest. It’s surprising that they’re just a quartet (Sebastian Frigren on guitar, Antti Poutanen on bass, Okko Tolvanen on drums), because there are multiple layers of guitar on basically every song, and some atmospheric synths in the background, particularly on the short instrumental “Mourning Star,” which arrives in the middle of the album. Poutanen adds some jazz fusion bits here and there, and there are plenty of moments that would cause me to file them under progressive death metal (“The Contemptor” is built around a stolen Opeth riff). It’s weird that it took them this long to make a full-length album, but I hope to hear more from them sooner rather than later.

Dysgnostic, also signed to Transcending Obscurity, are from Denmark. They got started in 2008 as Defilementory, and released an EP and an album under that name before realizing how badly it sucked and changing it in 2021. Scar Echoes, their first release as Dysgnostic, came out in August 2022. One listen gives a pretty good idea of what they mean by dissonant; from the very first chords of the opening track, also called “Dysgnostic,” the guitar riffs slip and slide as though improperly tuned, and the tempos feel unsteady, but deliberately so. It’s a crawlingly slow song, somewhere between death metal and doom, very reminiscent of Incantation, though bassist/vocalist Thomas Fischer sounds more like Kevin Sharp of Brutal Truth. (He shifts to a dramatic stage whisper on “Nothing’s Embrace,” and it works really well.) On the second track, “Silvery Tongues,” they speed up — well, the drums do, anyway, galloping along as a wave of blast beats; the riffs from guitarists Simon Klem Kannegard and Richardt Olsen (who also plays drums; I don’t know how they handle this live) stay slow and gloomy. I haven’t heard any of the Defilementory material, but these guys seem justifiably confident in their sound, having evolved it over time; there’s nothing here that feels like a failed experiment. Of these four albums, I’ve listened to Scar Echoes the most.

Ignominy are from Quebec, and have been together for a decade, but their debut album, Imminent Collapse, just came out in March. They know from dissonance; the first song, “Frantic Appeasement,” begins with some clanging not-quite-chords and bursts of static that remind me of the beginning of “Catholic Block,” the second track on Sonic Youth’s Sister. Most of the time, vocalist Alex Desroches has a bearlike roar in the vein of Meshuggah’s Jens Kidman or Cannibal Corpse’s George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, but once in a while, like in the final minute of “Defaulting Genetics,” he’ll switch to a black metal croak that sounds like a demon-possessed Popeye the Sailor. The riffs Philippe Gariépy plays have a slicing-through-sheet metal quality with lots of sustain; comparisons I’ve seen to New Zealand’s Ulcerate, who also blend crushing heaviness with morose atmospheres, make sense. Bassist Alexandre Préfontaine and drummer Marc-Antoine Lazure lay down doomy patterns that fall into place like a rockslide that somehow ends up as a mosaic. This is a relatively short album — six songs and two interludes in less than 35 minutes — but listening to it feels like pushing a boulder uphill. I think I’m going to be spending a lot more time with this one this summer.

Nightmarer are the only band in this essay not signed to Transcending Obscurity; their album Deformity Adrift is on their own label, Total Dissonance Worship. Having heard the album, I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I might be willing to accept Competent Embrace of Dissonance as One Compositional Element Among Many. This is their second full-length, after 2018’s Cacophony of Terror; they’ve also released two EPs, 2016’s Chasm and 2021’s Monolith of Corrosion. I haven’t heard any of those records, but based on this album, I want to. Nightmarer’s music sounds like a grinding, extremely heavy version of industrial postpunk. Songs like “Brutalist Imperator” and “Taufbefehl” (translation: “baptism command”) have a Godflesh/Killing Joke/Ministry/Prong feel, Simon Hawemann’s and Keith Merrow’s guitars chugging and rumbling like an avalanche, with Paul Seidel’s drums crashing like waves, while vocalist John Collett unleashes a grayscale roar. Faster, more grinding tracks like “Hammer of Desolation,” “Baptismal Tomb,” and “Throe of Illicit Withdrawal” embrace the ultra-heaviness of murky death metal acts like Portal and Ævangelist, groups more concerned with sheer sonic punishment than catharsis. The use of a short string interlude to lead into the album’s final track, “Obliterated Shrine,” is a nice touch. And this album, too, is short — nine tracks in just under 32 minutes.

So! Having listened to all four of these albums, what have we determined are the salient qualities of dissonant death metal? I would vote for: monochromatic vocal roars, chugging guitars that sometimes sound so downtuned they’re out of tune, sluggish tempos with occasional bursts of speed, and pinch harmonic squeals. If you were going to paint to this music, you’d wind up with something consisting of lots of shades of gray, from charcoal to slate, with the occasional dark orange streak piercing through. All this music is good, but I wouldn’t call it “enjoyable” unless you’re in a very specific mood. It doesn’t even have the explosive power of what you could call “weight-bench death metal” (Vader, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse). It’s surly, glaring-at-strangers music built for headphone listening. If the winters where you are get really cold and slushy, hang onto these albums until then, because that’s when they’ll sound perfect.

One last thing, before I go: Metallica’s St. Anger turns 20 this week, and I wrote an essay about it for Stereogum. Short version: it’s a pretty great noise-rock record.

That’s it for now. See you next week!