Since their formation in 2016, Costa Rican industrial black metal project Dusk, featuring Shaman on vocals, Implacable on guitar, Palak on bass and frontman Dusk on synth, have been hard at work. Just one year after the release of Rethrenody, a fifth album, Industrie, has already been announced for May 31. If, throughout this dark discography, the mix of genres is just as congruent as the evolution of the sounds it proposes, Industrie also remains in this vein, once again exhuming that claustrophobic atmosphere so dear to the band, between stifling post-apocalyptic haze, disquieting metallic rustling and monstrous-like vocals.
Far from being mainstream, Industrie nonetheless plunges us from the very first notes into a cinematic universe that, while still vitiated and anguished, is also richer and more melodious than its predecessors, making it more digestible and accessible. Aided by a nightmarish voice from another world, the incisive yet melancholy tone (the first track already verges on a certain despair) dances with a coldness that is at times almost martial, literally transporting us into a fog of devastated landscapes, so much so that when you close your eyes, you imagine yourself as a biomechanical being straight out of Giger's universe, searching for a little humanity in a dysfunctional, icy world.
There's a certain beauty to this shade of noisy aesthetics, as the work on each track never fails to be evolutionary and varied in its construction, keeping a tempo that's at times almost catchy (Industrie II maintains a crushing but very dynamic rhythm right to the end), drawing on a considerable variety of styles and genres (one might think of Skinny Puppy, Blut aus Nord, Ice Ages...). Industrie III might even sound like the bloody specter of a Massive Attack song in the midst of a depression), creating a coherent whole rooted in the very depths of our being.
Industrie VI, the final chapter (which in fact precedes a cover of Mayhem's Freezing moon) is accompanied by a video that fleshes out the Dusk universe even further, with images from Shinya Tsukamoto's cult film Tetsuo, in which a man with a bad skin becomes a kind of mutated Android in order to be able to fully exist again. This metaphor for a traumatized society reborn through salvific suffering aptly closes this horrific cyberpunk chasm that has taken us far and wide.
