At the end of 2024, Nancy-based duo Aabode released Neo-Age, a debut album that was not exactly new age. A magmatic sonic chaos mixing extreme metal and industrial, this initial misdemeanour betrayed a taste for grime and noise that was as enjoyable as it was intriguing. So, naturally, when the band promised a second album that was ‘a little cleaner, less extreme’, we were a little concerned: with Hyper-Death, had Aabode become more mainstream? Towards the end, there's a track called Channel N°5: is Aabode going to sell us perfume?
All these questions are rhetorical. It's a fancy way of saying ‘it's bullshit’. Rest assured, fear not: Hyper-Death is terrifying and disgusting. More black metal-oriented, they said? Certainly. The menacing guitar that opens This Abode Has People In It is a perfect illustration of this. A techno beat is grafted onto it, a distant voice wails. Aabode lurks in the darkness, sinister, before attacking savagely.
The approach is pleasing: no, you're not going to dance, as ‘industrial’ is not a word used here to mean ‘basic martial riffs and a bit of electro to get you swaying’. If there is dancing, it will be primitive, disorderly, dangerous. Aabode deconstructs, piles up, destroys, regurgitates. Samples and rhythm breaks seem to tell a story, the kind that we avoid expressing clearly with words. Cleaner, less extreme? Perhaps, but we prefer to say ‘more channelled’: this second album serves its purpose, with tracks that are increasingly effective. Not in the sense that they make you want to clap your hands, no, in the sense that they ultimately exude something more frightening and unhealthy.
A hallucinatory nightmare sensation haunts the album from start to finish, something grimacing like Skinny Puppy in the screeching vocals, but with thrash/death or black metal riffs. Take Code Catalogue, the epic God Has Entered My Body, Like A Body My Same Size or Grand Nancy: it starts off like a neck-wringing exercise before mutating into a mutant beast with trap, noise, industrial or dark ambient undertones. Putrid delirium tremens, descent into madness, laughter, growls... it feels like home!
Hyper-Death exudes a kind of deviant humour, a hellish irony. Let's get back to Channel N°5, whose title evokes consumerism as much as the fascination of cathode ray tubes. Heavy, incisive and protean, with a few gurgling sounds that seem to be emitted by an inhuman voice, we're not likely to hear this stuff in a perfume advert any time soon. Too bad. Dissonant and free from conventions, as black metal should be more often, with its noisy and synthetic impulses, Hyper-Death is a stinking monster with an indescribable silhouette, a whirlwind of darkness and strangeness in which we love to be torn apart. Let us chant in unison before this ruthless beast, for the end is near!
