DISSIMULATOR will release their second album, "Artifice Dissolves", on October 2 via 20 Buck Spin. Lead track "Alloyed" is streaming now.
The Montreal trio is drawn from a deep bench of Quebec extreme metal — drummer Philippe Boucher, bassist Antoine Daigneault and guitarist/vocalist Claude Leduc, between them veterans of CHTHE'ILIST, ATRAMENTUS, BEYOND CREATION and INCANDESCENCE. Their debut, "Lower Form Resistance", landed on the same label in early 2024.
This one accelerates past it. The band's jagged sci-fi death/thrash has turned into a more labyrinthine construct, fusing serrated riff matrices and volatile rhythmic architecture into something the label describes as an algorithm-obliterating neural hack. Razor-wire guitar lines, alien but not unfamiliar, whiplash and intersect at impossible angles while the rhythm section drives "Alloyed" and "Neon Metropolis" through repeated cycles of acceleration, collapse and reassembly.
The world it builds is a civilisation wasting away in the sunless gutters of its own autonomous megacities — the fever dreams of an omniscient god-machine and the malignant side effects of its cybernetic upgrades. Underneath the precision, though, the band keep hold of a recognisably human striving for order and transcendence.
"Alloyed" makes that tension explicit, and Leduc reached for a philosopher to explain it.
"'Alloyed' is a philosophical musing about Günther Anders' concept of Promethean shame — the idea that deep down human beings feel inferior or diminished against the perfection of their technological creations," he said. "The song highlights the band's syncopated riffing style chugging in lockstep with the lyrics, which describe this self-alienation metaphorically through the motivations and consequences of undergoing a procedure to become fully cybernetic. It is a reminder that the real danger of our relationship to technology is not that machines will surpass humans, but that humans will lower themselves to machines."
Drums were recorded by Xavier Berthiaume at Productions Tehom. The band tracked the bulk of the album themselves, including additional vocals from Laurent Bellemare on several songs, before Hugues Deslauriers reamped, mixed and mastered it at Roarrrsoundsstudio. The sleeve is by Noah Cutter Meihoff, who has worked with GHOST and IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT, with layout by Audrey Pasquini at Bangs! Studio and photography by Kristel Boucher.
Anyone who leans toward OBLIVEON, SADUS, VOIVOD, CRYPTIC SHIFT, MISCREANCE, VEKTOR, WATCHTOWER, ATHEIST, HEXX, DECAPITATED, MESHUGGAH or CYNIC is the target audience here.
"Artifice Dissolves" track listing:
- Apophenic Rage
- Hungry Ghosts
- Artifice Dissolves
- Alloyed
- Proprioceptor
- Dusk
- Neon Metropolis
- Anodyne
- Robostrobos
It arrives on LP, CD and digital.
Pre-order: 20 Buck Spin webshop · Bandcamp