Giallo – Tenebrarum
Twenty two minutes of suffocating, feral hardcore that claws at your throat and refuses to let go.
Not long ago, a mysterious four piece hardcore punk band from Minneapolis dropped their full-length Tenebrarum, following up their eight track debut EP from 2022. The name alone immediately stood out, especially if you are even remotely familiar with the film genre it references. Finding a band whose sound actually lives up to a name like that does not happen very often.
Tenebrarum feels like a direct continuation of the earlier material, only pushed further into extremity. At roughly twenty two minutes and mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios, the record wastes no time establishing its intensity. Their take on hardcore punk is relentless, suffocating, and deliberately abrasive.
It opens with an ominous synth piece, chain rattling in the background, created by Terror Cell Unit, setting a tense and suspenseful mood. That brief calm is quickly swallowed by a barrage of punishing noise. The vocals seethe with rage, and the instrumentation feels tighter than a grip around the listener’s throat. As the album progresses it only grows more uncompromising, clawing forward without offering any real escape.
The final stretch hits especially hard. After another interlude, the record closes with the sludgy “Black Cat,” where unsettling feedback and a disorienting saxophone line crawl beneath vocals that sound close to collapse, a subtle nod to Hoax’s 2013 self-titled opener. It is an uncomfortable ending, but also a fitting and strangely cathartic one.
It is hard to fully explain why Tenebrarum overwhelms the way it does, but it is rare to hear a modern hardcore record this focused and feral. If there is any doubt, watching their live set at Como Backdoor in 2023 only reinforced that impression.
