Highly recommended. Immune to the ceaseless, stubborn world they’ve created and hungry for your fear, Disappears have constructed a new monument called ‘Irreal’. It’s a vampiric post-punk album that buries its listener in riffs so repetitive they feel like drones, and it also features an unwavering baritone that gets close to my idea of an Old Testament God (if that God was into degenerative “noise rock” and had some big ideas about Nietzsche, which I admit is pretty much impossible). Beyond its first track -- the enrapturing “Interpretation“, which colours in the krautrock grey with yelps and inventive left-turns -- ‘Irreal’ feels like a journey that becomes more and more numbing as it goes on, each track going deeper into nothingness. That’s Kranky brand nihilism for you: you always get too deep.
