Human Obsession by INSADE

REMASTERED CD / LP COMING SOON FROM CRUCIAL BLAST

Sometimes I think its fate when I accidentally stumble across a band that re-arranges my skull in new and terrible ways. For decades, the floodgates have been open: the internet is a vast deluge of obscure bedroom bands, unknown entities self-releasing their music digitally with little to no fanfare, amazing bands who exist solely on Bandcamp pages and / or Youtube channels, their presence and sound more ephemeral and sometimes fleeting. It's staggering, being an explorer in the further regions of extreme and underground music and art, knowing that you'll never, ever hear it all. It's one of the reasons that I'm such a fan of curation, be it via high-quality music websites, printed zines with particular tastes, and record stores with their ear to the ground. But so much of the stuff that I've discovered in the past year or two happened simply by coming across a video on Youtube with music from a virtually unknown band with just a handful of followers.

Like when I discovered Insade.

A young death metal band that had been grinding away in the Montreal underground since 2017, Insade had released a steady stream of digital releases and singles over the past seven years, primarily through their Bandcamp page. Nothing had ever been released physically, much like many other younger contemporary death metal bands. But at the very beginning of 2024, Insade quietly self-released their second full-length album Human Obsession, which made its way to Youtube by way of the excellent Metal Vault channel. That's where I first heard it, and that's where this insane, eccentric death metal band first blew my head apart. Obsession and Insade bombarded me with some of the sickest death metal I've heard in years, and that original eight-song album invaded my mis-firing neurons on a permanent basis. It's a much more inventive and disturbing piece of sonic barbarism than the heavily hardcore-influenced death/thrash of their first album (2022's Ready for Hell), crawling into somewhat unorthodox corners of extreme music while constantly staying rooted in the technical mania and aberrant heaviness of 1990’s-era OSDM that these guys clearly cut their teeth on. And that's part of what makes Obsession such a standout: the sheer psychotic horror that emanates from each song. Something happened in the interim since their first album that evolved the band into a much more unique-sounding monstrosity, and produced this brain-crusher of an album.

And man, this album really is a destroyer. Draped in themes of abject existential horror and transcendence through madness, Human Obsession is a warhead of violent, relentless death metal delivered by a band that's really honed their craft. From the crazed whirlwind of opener "Breed the Maggots" that leads into some of the album's most barbaric riffing paired with rhythmic sewer clank, the unsettling sample / ambient interlude "Man In The Chair", and the insanely hysterical weirdness of "Gnosis" that welds even wilder vocals with technical violence, Insade unleash apocalyptic hell. The dual vocals (in both English and French) from guitarists Fred Legault and Pepe Baz are layered together into uncontrolled psychosis, gruesome guttural roars and truly rabid shrieks and depraved howling, making this one of the most anxiety-drenched, unhinged-sounding death metal performances in recent memory.

That mania and violence is brilliantly suffused with their energetic old-school death metal crush, making Obsession sound genuinely like the work of unstable minds. And breakdowns? Truly ignorant. What makes this feel so much more animalistic and volatile is how Insade shoot stranger toxins into their "OSDM" veins, with the music erupting with blasts of powerviolence-tinged derangement, bursts of street-level hardcore frenzy, searing and disgusting electronic noise, barbaric thrash, blighted ambience, even moments of epic majesty.
That lunacy courses through tracks like the grueling 90's-death worship of "Génitrice", the dissonance and offbeat riffing on "Sentenced to Life", and "Celestial Being"'s rhythmic complexity and killer vocal dynamics. The title track bulldozes over you with gargantuan death-doom before spinning out into dark, atmospheric tech-blast. "Boarding - Crosscheck" is a two-part medley, beginning with a wall of berserk noise-grind cut-up, a bizarre and brutally abrasive blast of abstract, glitchy death havoc boiling with industrial pandemonium, horrific chopped-up death metal, and extreme electronic sadism, then seamlessly breaking into the pummeling groove and riot-inducing chug-a-thon of the latter half. Finally, the album closes with the previously unreleased "bonus” track "Undiscovered Wonders of the Ancient World", exclusive to the Crucial Blast release of Human Obsession, a bone-crushing epic that ascends to heights of vicious splendor and monumental thrashing melodic death metal.

Frightening, chaotic brutality, delivered in a deceptively coherent manner that raises the intensity of Human Obsession to hazardous levels. The influence of classic death metal pioneers like Suffocation, Obituary, Gorguts, early Edge Of Sanity echoes throughout the album, with touches of iconic Canadian tech-barbarians like Reign of Lunacy-era Gorelust and Purulence, but also moments where I'm reminded of French hardcore nihilists Kickback. Supreme barbaric ferocity fit for a world cast in shadows...Insade have firmly established themselves as a deadly force in underground death metal.

Crucial Blast is an independent underground label, online shop, and small press specializing in cutting edge, weird, and experimental heavy music and related cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on blackened avant-metal, nihilistic noise/industrial, dark ambiance, infernal psychedelia, hardcore improv/free-jazz, and experimental horror film / literature.

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