If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face, forever... These famous words by George Orwell set the tone and resound throughout the debut full-length album from Brazil's dark hardcore punk sect Obsoletion. A grim and foreboding crossover hybridization of blackened hardcore punk and primordial heavy metal drawing influences from bands like Cro-Mags, Integrity, Sheer Terror (from which the band took its name), Mayhem, Celtic Frost, Hellhammer, G.I.S.M. Carnivore and Possessed, and serving as a dismal soundtrack to a dark world that is rapidly deteriorating and just getting worse. The bleak and primeval self-titled assault masterminded by the São Paulo cult conjures shadows of a stark future dystopia and of sinister visions of fear, alienation and paranoia coming from within oppressive militarist technocracies and corrupt surveillance-states aiming for total social enslavement, while the natural world and man's last shreds of sanity revel and toil in a final battle for retribution and survival. The album's lyrics and its staggering retro-futurist art design (by Fernando Giotefeli, Jordy Kuster and José Vinícius) also explore concepts of magic and occultism from the 19th and 20th centuries, transfigured into present and future unrest, making themes such as cyborgism, post-humanism, and surveillance capitalism extremely relevant and ominous. The band's raw and gruesome riffs weaponize these themes and ignite the barricades, engulfing the listener in a maelstrom of tear gas, fire and shrapnel, compounding twenty minutes of wrath and refusal into a violent sonic cyberpunk epic that celebrates the glory days of US 80's and early 90's hardcore punk, thrash, death, black and heavy metal.
