Uranium

***After the glorious Wormboiler cassette tape compilation obliterated human ears in 2021, American one-man black industrial weapon Uranium finally emerges from the depths of oblivion with its debut full-length album An Exacting Punishment, a five-track, forty-minute radioactive nightmare of complete sonic ruin channelling the darkness of black metal with the scathing immensity of defining post-industrial acts like Brighter Death Now, Godflesh, Wolf Eyes, Swans, MZ. 412, Controlled Bleeding, and Genocide Organ. As the band's name aptly hints at, Uranium was conceived as an aural vessel to explore the outer limits and the most irreversible states of complete human disintegration, and the incineration of its most defining and triumphant achievements; namely society, progress, technology, and civilization, with nuclear power being the conduit and ultimate engine of the greatest and most horrific forms of total annihilation mankind could ever face. Auditory terror both permeates and defines Uranium's music, with bludgeoning and majestic post-industrial soundscapes pulsing inside a lightless void lit only by drifting embers and falling ash, while immense infernal atmospherics wrap their deathly spires around the listener, crushing them into a distorted auditory abyss. Power electronics, industrial noise and black metal have rarely before been seen chained together and weaponized into such a mortal design. An authentic weapon of mass annihilation engineered to face human life with absolute death. A death-scarred reality that emerges from the utter bleakness and ruination of Uranium's apocalyptic design, as the listener is cast at the center of a caustic nuclear nightmare where flesh boils and evaporates off bone, cells erratically split into endless deformities and the world is turned into a mangled, corroded and disfigured radioactive oblivion.