(written by Islander)
On this Christmas Eve don’t worry that your stocking (mental or physical) will be filled with lumps of coal come the dawn. Worry instead that it will be filled with Black Mold. Although, depending on your tastes, that might be one of the best gifts you could hope for.
To be clear, we’re not talking about Stachybotrys chartarum, the fungus whose musty spores can cause mycosis or trigger illness or even death among those allergic to its spores. Instead, our subject today is a new outgrowth of punk-infused black metal by the Portuguese band Black Mold — seven poisonous new songs collected on an EP named Antinomy that’s set for tape release by Helldprod Records on Christmas Day, December 25th.
Black Mold have been spreading their musical toxins since releasing a first demo (Atavism) in 2018, and their releases now include a pair of albums (2020’s Inheritance of Evil and 2024’s In the Dirt of Oblivion) and an EP in between them (2023’s The Unnatural Red Glow of the Night).
And yes, Black Mold’s music has been, and still is, toxic in many respects, but as Antinomy vividly displays, their music is capable of infecting listeners in other ways as well. The EP’s opening song “Grinding Death” proves that immediately.
On the one hand, it discharges rapidly pounding beats, caustic and crusty riffing that maniacally roils and brazenly blares, and ferocious howls coated in grit and raw with malice. On the other hand, the rhythms shift into bounding punk gaits, and the riffing sounds bleak and cruel as well as feral and fierce.
While the opener is geared toward getting muscles jumping and blood rushing, “A Stoney Hole’s Hermit” slows things down a bit into a rocking groove and introduces eerily swirling and feverishly whistling notes above the riffing’s grim throb and the vocals’ raw and tortured snarls. The music sounds unearthly and dangerous, oppressive but also demented — haughty, harrowing, and hallucinatory.
Those first two songs back to back are by themselves a demonstration that Black Mold’s toxins manifest in very different ways. With the next song, “Mocking Skull“, they return to more feral and ferocious impulses. The song throbs in almost all its aspects, from the punchy drumming to the devilish riffing, which sounds both sinister and murderous, while “Tightropes” hammers and surges like the rise and fall of dark and malicious tides, augmented by a vividly growling bass and those abrasively raking and rabidly barking vocals.
“Cramped on Nothing” is the shortest of the songs but it’s also the most exotic. Like every other song, it includes rhythms that are compulsive muscle-movers, but what stands out are its strangely warbling and vibrantly glittering arpeggios, which sound almost like spritely lyres or lutes. Black Mold then follow that with the contrasting experience of “The Inertial Fog“, a hard-charging blood-rush of barbarous madness etched with pain and desperation.
And at last comes an “outro” track, but it’s not what you’ll probably be expecting with a name like that. It’s actually the EP’s longest song, and it is a full-fledged song. The riffing initially creates a dismal and distraught mood, and the vocals include ragged gang singing — though it’s really too raw and seemingly alcohol-fueled to be called singing.
Black Mold also spice up this sorrowful song with bursts of percussive mania, a gut-slugging bass, flares of brazen chords, and a closing cavalcade of conversational voices and freaked-out electronics.
How to sum up the experience of the EP as a whole? Well, it’s gnarly and gnashing, ravenously and wretchedly unhinged in its vocals, stripped-down and feral like punk but still capable of viscerally casting many shades of darkness in its changing moods, and relentlessly compulsive in its changing rhythmic grooves.
And with that, we fill your stockings with our premiere stream of Antinomy in full:
As mentioned, Antinomy will be released by Helldprod Records on December 25th on cassette tape, limited to 50 copies. Pre-orders are available now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://helldprod.bandcamp.com/album/black-mold-antinomy
https://helldprod.com/shop/black-mold-antinomy