Exclusive Track Premiere: Replicant – “Nekrotunnel”
New dizzying heights.
On April 12, 2024, Transcending Obscurity Records will release Infinite Mortality, the third full-length from New Jersey’s Replicant, a group of plank-browed geniuses whose knuckles drag on the very ground where they scribble out the key to all mythologies in the blood and skin ripped from their hands by the glass-bottle strewn concrete. As Spear said in his 5/5 review of Replicant’s brilliant 2021 Malignant Reality, this shit is dumb smart.
Nestled towards the end of Infinite Mortality between lead single “Pain Enduring” and the blisteringly short “Dwelling on the Threshold,” today’s exclusive premiere is the official video for 4th single “Nekrotunnel.” While the troglodytic miscreants had, according to Spear, barely evolved to even create fire on their brilliant Malignant Reality, there’s definitely “fire in the songwriting” of tracks like “Nekrotunnel,” as Replicant’s members “[refuse] to succumb to the lull of complacency [while] working furiously, constantly on the songs to elevate them to a rarefied category.”
This rarefied category, where only certain bands of a certain strata can balance convolution and impact, can meld together dissonance with catchiness, certainly belongs to Replicant, and “Nekrotunnel” pushes these delicate balances to an indelicate and ruthless extreme. James Applegate’s frantic drumming underlies the at-times deceptively simple groovy riffing from guitarists Pete Lloyd and Itay Keren as bassist/vocalist Mike Gonçalves manically roars and howls across and above the whole blistering affair. “Nekrotunnel,” sonically, is that precise synthesis of disparate parts towards a new form that one would rightly call avant garde. This is where the band’s affinity with Diskord, Ulcerate, and Resin Tomb really shines through the murk and mire.
About the track the band has this to say:
“Thematically, this excerpt from Infinite Mortality is about birth as the prelude to death. The spirit inhabits a sack of flesh and nerves as it is thrust into a dimension of mortality to experience the horrors of existence—an everdying realm of pain, anxiety, and fear. We exist in this ephemeral vessel set with an expiration to ascend beyond this hell. Spiral through the Nekrotunnel and begin the journey of decay.”
There is certainly a sense of ephemerality and embodied horror at work in the song’s video (dir. Mike Ximenez). It is a dizzying panorama of 120 Minutes aesthetics, Eyehategod visual pastiche, and grainy Crowbar music videos, with disembodied faces floating behind the band members and an ever-present, haunting cog or wheel. It is all so much a flashing, uncomfortable, and discomfiting layering of such markers of the horrors of existence (the body, the metaphor of the cog in the machine, the literal effects of the grinding machinery of industrial modernity on our flesh and spirit) into a palimpsestic vertigo from which we stare up, however blindly and madly, at our hopeful ascension from this current hellscape. Watch below and tell me there isn’t.
See? I told ya.
While we’re proud as all hell to be able to premiere this track from what will certainly be a consensus Top Ten Album ov the Year in 2024, we’re also stoked to share details of Replicant’s upcoming European tour with fellow brain-drainers Anachronism:
Best of luck surviving that one, my dear European friends! Maybe get some of that free psychoanalysis to which some of you I know have access. You’re gonna need it to process this.
Infinite Mortality is out April 12
on Transcending Obscurity Records.
You’re not gonna believe this, but…
there’s a whole bunch of dope swag.
I need something—anything!—
with Alli Tuttle’s incredible album art on it.
