A SURPRISE EP was released by the Norwegian band Årabrot, the duo of Kjetil Nernes and Karin Park, a few weeka ago, featuring a striking roster of guest musicians: Dana Schechter, of Insect Ark and Swans; Andrew Liles, (Current 93/Nurse With Wound) and tubaist Kristoffer Lo (Highasakite / Motorpsycho) among them.
The gothic post-rock purveyors intended these tracks for 2017’s Who Do You Love, the EP’s title track even being considered as the main single. Yet the EP, entitled The World Must Be Destroyed, is lightyears from being a drop in the band’s relentless, surging creativity. In fact, these tracks materialised as some of Årabrot’s personal favourites of that era.
On the aforementioned title track, Nernes and Park bring a characteristic, dystopian rancour with a nerve-rending juggernaut. The track’s spectacular, practically epiphany-inducing riff provides the fitting platform for the EP’s sadistic pleas for “revolution”. Even more, the skin-shredding production, courtesy of Gregg Norman at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago, enhances this, as well as cataclysmic drums and similarly bludgeoning claps.
A doubly ravaging onslaught, laying down jackhammer blows of percussion, propelling alongside the freakish, jerking riffs, which march fervently toward a toppling of a decaying society, “Another Hallucinatory Dream” is also a prominent evocation of the influence the band enshrined on the EP: Antonin Artaud’s biography of child emperor Heliogabalus.
The eeriness of the track’s sonic accoutrements – a ringing synth and macabre chimes – and the snarling vocals are an elevating embodiment of Artaud’s anarchic masterwork
The EP is closed by a spoken-word reprise of the title track’s fatalistic, acid-tongued spirit; delivering prophetic proclamations of “I see right through you”, “They say the World must be destroyed”, in Nernes’ deep, emphatic tones, atop a synthesised drone and encroaching, ticking clock.
The noise-rock titan also announced a surprise album, Norwegian Gothic, due to be released on April 9th on Pelagic Records. Listen to a taster track, “The Lie”, here.
Hear the EP in full below.
