Welcome to Demo:listen, your weekly peek into the future of underground metal. Whether it’s death, grind, black, doom, sludge, heavy, progressive, stoner, retro, post-, etc. we’re here to bring you the latest demos from the newest bands. On this week’s Demo:listen, we stand back and watch it all burn to the ground with Sweden’s Naturvidrig.
Naturvidrig come from Värmland, Sweden and play black metal the way apex predators kill. That is, without mercy and seemingly out of some deep-borne necessity. Naturvidrig’s vocalist Ataraktika tells Demo:listen how he and Naturvidrig’s other member, guitarist Thomsen “arrived at black metal as the logical end point of an arduous personal and musical advance . . . black metal is the vehicle most apt for exploring and expressing the intellectual and artistic themes that occur to us naturally. The project was birthed as a function of this.”
Yeah? Hell yeah! Sönderfall, the Swede’s six track demo, for all its brevity, is a relentless attack of expertly channeled cacophony. And while a track like “Miserabilist” (hear below) shows off the duo’s versatility and their ability at getting you to bang your head instead of just constantly conjuring flames of perdition, the latter is definitely their tendency.
If your ears are as attuned to such things as ours are you may notice that the drums while not entirely inhuman sound ever so slightly ersatz. If such knowledge escaped you, don’t feel chagrined. One metal blogger called Naturvidrig’s drumming “peerless.” Anyway, Ataraktika explains: “The drums are indeed programmed . . . The main reason for this being the project’s infancy and a corresponding lack of equipment and funds, making properly recorded acoustic drums unfeasible for a proof-of-concept EP. Thomsen is in addition to a guitar player also a drummer. He wrote the majority of the drum parts and is more than capable of playing the material.” All part of a demo’s charm, right? We here at Demo:listen are as satisfied with the end result of Sönderfall as we are stoked for whatever comes next. According to Ataraktika, the band is already writing new material as well as “recruiting” live musicians.
A cassette version of Sönderfall just dropped on the new-ish label, Ancient Future. While you still can, get your claws on a copy of this demo as it’s destined to someday be a relic from the dawning of Naturvidrig.
You heard it here at Demo:listen. Check this space next and every Friday for promising new metal.
