IRN - Sewer Disease

Written by Ulla Roschat.


The sewer disease is nasty and highly contagious. The very first contact with this aural malodorous pestilence that oozes from your speakers like the essence of every kind of foul insanity will infect you and slowly, but inevitably, cover and shroud you in a devouring nightmare.

Sewer Disease is the second album of Toronto’s three piece band IRN. The band founded in 2012, put out their self titled debut album in 2013 and Sewer Disease was released in 2014. This is three tracks and about 40 minutes of sludgy doom, slow, thick, gluey and heavy.

Right from the start the first song “Sewers” sets out to drag you into those very ones named in the title. In several build ups of sound, drenched in fuzz, the song crawls up to you like bubbling, boiling waves of caustic filth and hatred. The next one “Causing Decay” then overwhelms and inundates you like a nauseating maelstrom that takes you into a world of septic, reeking hideousness and abominable existence with its monolithic riffs and hypnotizing rhythms to enhance the sense of a creepy lurking danger. "Rat’s Disease”, the last song of the album and with an epic length of about 20 minutes is the most extensive in variety, intensity and change of moods. Sparsely used quiet parts that feel like a break from all the density gives room to catch your breath, but only to make you feel the next heavy crushing riff all the more.

Throughout the three tracks of the album the riffs seem to be caught in their own fuzz and reverb to brew up intensity. Rhythms with a pace near to asystolia create a nightmarish atmosphere of damp depressive paralysis bare of any prospect to escape from all this fetid filth, infectious matter and slime.

And as if all this wasn't nasty enough, IRN add a subliminal noisy black metal vibe, with jarring guitars and a trembling, buzzing vibration, that pierce through the infectious boiling mire, grind the gangrenous wounds and stir up the nauseating stench. This increases the unsettling sense of a lurking threat of sickness and insanity to make the state of paralysis even more horrifying. What more could you wish for from a perfect nightmare?

The song “Causing Decay” is featured on The Wicked Lady Show 76.

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]