tetsuo – fauna.
A fractured descent into identity and collapse, this is a skramz record that's dense, disorienting, and difficult by design.
Athens, Greece post-hardcore/skramz duo tetsuo approached us with their latest record fauna., released via Spleencore Records a few months ago. It’s not an easy listen, at least not at first. The sound is dense, abrasive, and structurally disorienting with its noise and industrial experimentations, but once you find your footing in its internal logic, things start to click.
Formed in 2025 by Alice Anthimou and Evripidis Kyparissis, tetsuo made their debut with desert flowers, a brief but intense burst of shrill, high-energy tracks. With fauna., they push that same energy further into more conceptual territory. The lyrics came first, originally written as a poetry collection, with the music built around them afterward. Evripidis’ crushing riffs give the material its gravity and direction.
The record unfolds as a fractured narrative centered on identity, self-dissolution, and psychological rupture, drawing heavily from Alice Anthimou’s personal experience leading up to her transition. The opening track, “Crushed by the Waves,” sets the harsh tone immediately (think of bands like pg.99 or newer ones like Nuvolascura). A body dissolving into something else, replaced by something hostile. From there, the record moves through displacement, self-dissection, and collapse. Identities break apart, reform, and dissolve again. Tracks like “Spare Parts” and “Feeding Hour” lean hard into grotesque imagery, while “Birdcage” feels more drained than resolved. The closer, “Ecdysis,” reframes everything that came before it. Shedding your skin isn’t a form of liberation. You can’t escape yourself, just face what’s left.
What stands out most is their vision. Even at its most abstract, fauna. never feels random or self-indulgent, it stays true to its own logic throughout. Though that same commitment to instability can occasionally work against it. There are moments where the dense noisescapes slide into repetition, and rather than building tension, it ends up flattening it. It works best heard as a single, continuous descent rather than a collection of individual tracks. It’s uneven in places, but it has a distinct and uncomfortable vision, a brutal look at identity, loss, and transformation through a harsh post-hardcore lens.
