Off their new LP Pain Behaviour, Toronto death rockers Dermabrasion share a new video for Grim Sister and also announce a string of Irish tour dates in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. I hear here.
Grim Sister’s drive beat and electronic post-punk ranks somewhere between the intensity of Alien Sex Fiend and the bravado of Motorhead. The raw vocal energy builds with the intensity of the band’s drums and delivers a distinct and commanding sound. The track can flow alongside Ministry’s Halloween, Boy Harsher’s Pain, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult’s After the Flesh, or any mixtape made for an underground dance club when time slips to nothing but pointless numbers on a clock and midnight finally disappear with sunrise.
Scrape the scum and grime off the floors of every bar and basement in so-called Toronto that dared host a mob of unruly hard kids or sweaty, wavy goths, and you have Dermabrasion — in sound and spirit, a “sound palace of noise” as The Louder Than War blessed them.
For just over a year, the duo have been selling their meaty post-punk in and around their hometown with a deceptively wild live show that has seen them support slots for the likes of Vision Video, Lydia Lunch Retrovirus, Special Interest, Pixel Grip , Nox Novacula and Patrick Codenys of Front 242.
Dermabrasion’s 2021 demo EP Lunate marked the return to form of members Adam Bernhardt and Kat McGouran who began writing and performing together in 2015 with Toronto-based punk band WLMRT. The five-track on Lunate with a low-fi production reminiscent of early Sisters of Mercy recordings offered only a haunting, shadowy outline of what the pair now present with their full-length debut, Pain Behaviour.
It was launched earlier this year in Toronto Hand drawn by DraculaPain Behavior chews and unfurls sonic patterns across 10 tracks that weave together a collection of influences that reflect the years both musicians have spent undercover in their city’s nightlife. The beer-flavored ghouls who smoke outside venues that no longer exist. The smell of enhanced toilet hangs in the nightclub air along with the fog, lasers and Siouxsie.
Produced by Josh Korody (Fucked Up, Breeze, Beliefs, Traitrs) and mastered by Noah Mintz, Pain Behavior completes the horrific Dermabrasion statement first uttered with Lunate. Korody’s experience with electronic music has helped hone the band’s sound to a menacing edge they call “death rock and roll,” swaying equally in the directions of first-wave and contemporary post-punk, industrial, NWOBHM, and meathead rock.
Opening grooves like an album opener Halberdier and Goblin Dance You want to seduce like a California darkwave festival poster, while primitive advances like those of Proving Grounds and Sleepless betray a willful lack of discipline for the sound to ever fully stake its punk claim. Hardcore riff dressed for a goth night at the sports bar.
A fascination with corporeal form and occult threads through the lyrical theme in what McGurran describes as a “middle sense.” With allusions to Roman Catholicism, LaVeyan Satanism, and genre fiction, the songs on Pain Behavior explore the shame, power, duty, and responsibility of simply inhabiting a human body.
While many tracks feature existential questions, the full-on pastiche of the band’s ersatz creed is best demonstrated on the album’s mid-way herald anthem, Magic Missile. Over a thundering drum and whip-cracking snare hits, the question billows like smoke: When the gods falter, how big are the mistakes?
Check out new single Grim Sister, taken from the Pain Behavior album below:
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Pain Behavior Track List:
01. Halberdier
02. Grim Sister
03. Goblin Dance
04. Test ground
05. Traitor Moon
06. Magic rocket
07. Sleepless
08. Mental Event
09. In the Time of Queens
10. Black
Live dates for Dermabrasion:
May 22 – Dublin, Ireland – Fibber Magees Basement with Joe Maxi
May 24 – Cork City, Ireland – Fred Zeppelin
May 31 – Belfast, Ireland – Fibber Magees with an anal lobotomy, Joe Maxi
Dracula’s Hand Drawn | Website
Dermabrasion | Website | Bandcamp | Instagram
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