At the Gates will probably always hold the title for the most iconic death metal song about nausea, but Phobophilic just dropped a strong contender for second place. The second single from the Fargo, North Dakota band’s debut album, Enveloping Absurdity, is a ten-ton hammer of pitch-black death called “Nauseating Despair.” They’ve paired the existential nausea of the song’s sentiment – inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre and expounded on by the band in a statement below – with a video that’s quite literally nausea-inducing. Bare-bones performance footage unspools, the cuts getting quicker and quicker until what started as a band playing their song ends up looking like the kind of lo-fi, abstract video collage you might find in an avant-garde art gallery. It’s stirring stuff. Puke if you need to.
“‘Nauseating Despair’ is one of, if not the song we’re most proud of on the record and is the best representation of the album as a whole. It’s about a sudden and extreme self-awareness Sartre describes as ‘nausea.’ Once you’ve made this realization about the absurdity of life, there is no going back; it’s truly horrifying. In the video, we wanted to express this feeling and the jarring transition toward a state of acceptance through the frantic editing style which continues to build in intensity until the final moments of the song.”
Pre-order Enveloping Absurdity, out September 16 on Prosthetic Records.
