Extreme metal band Dissentor. Photo: Courtesy of Subcontinental Records
India’s newest extreme metal band Dissentor makes an abrasive entry onto the scene with debut track “Serving The Nails,” taken from their forthcoming EP Flagella, which drops later this month.
Dissentor started in 2020, when guitarist-producer Aquib Rahman met with vocalist Vedanta Kaushik (from Aizawl death metal band Third Sovereign) after 10 years over beers in Noida. Kaushik says, “The idea was to create something dirty, pissed off and which fucked norms.” As they got around to laying down vocals and working through ideas, the vocalist says Dissentor put “a lot of thinking and ideology with the aesthetics” of how they wanted the music to sound.
Originally using programmed drums for their tracks, the band enlisted Polish drummer and educator Krzysztof Klingbein (whose past India connection extends to working on a song with Mumbai metal artist Demonstealer, among others) and, at the very end, they brought in bassist Arun Natarajan (from Bengaluru prog-death metallers Eccentric Pendulum and death metal band Moral Collapse).
The four-track Flagella EP broadly takes aim at “the unspoken corrupted path to purification, of a belief in a savior, awaiting in the perfect irony, becoming an absurdist trap between worship and torment,” according to the band’s description. In a statement about “Serving The Nails,” the punishing lead single, the band says that, “[It] refers to entrusting in blind faiths and beliefs to an entity unknown. When the souls are rotten and reek of evil, nothing will bring us salvation.”
With their first EP out later this month, Dissentor intends to make their mark on the live circuit within India, even if that means bringing in a drummer to play Klingbein’s parts. Even though the members are in different parts of the country, Natarajan insists that once they have more material out, they plan to perform live. “We hope to get rid of the geographical Impossibilities and move ahead someday. It is hard, coming from the extreme ends of India — we are 2000 kilometers apart in all directions. We will try and employ session drummers wherever we go, that’s the way ahead. I’m sure there is an Indian drummer that we can crack soon.”
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