There’s something worrisome about the music of Antania. It’s hard to pinpoint, but there’s a certain menace about the songs on 3AM (unreleased) that elicits a primal dread. Anyone who’s ever felt that visceral fear and urge to run away as fast as possible while in a basement or walking home at night will understand.
Fear and dread aren’t foreign to metal and industrial music; both genres typically traffic in these emotions. But Antania is a different beast from the likes of Godflesh or Black Sabbath. Dr Luna and Kali Mortem create a dread from a general atmosphere rather than explicit lyrics, there are bands out there that talk about ripping guts out but don’t come close to bringing the fear like Antania does. The films of David Lynch and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft work in a similar vein. Antania music has more of life horror feel than Lovecraft or Lynch’s work, but the feelings it evokes are the same. Also, despite the fact that Antania’s music is generated artificially with electronics Dr Luna built himself, there’s still the feeling that these pieces are organic and alive. You can almost hear the music heaving with life. This is largely due to the bass music influence in the songs, with their pulsating bass tones that sound like the breathing of some repulsive biological abomination David Cronenberg dreamed up, the songs “Mouth Sewn Shut”, “COLD” (Static X cover) and “Blood Love” have a completely new original type of heavy. Mix Nu Metal, Black Metal and Bass Music all at once, put it in a blender and it will spew out Antania’s sound. I asked Dr Luna how he came up with something that sounds this heavy. He said “I found a way to create an incredibly heavy sound using keyboards and guitar distortion pedals. The sub bass heavy with distortion creates an incredibly heavy sound. We don’t touch our sample guitars. It’s the distortion pedals that make you think we do. I just love creating electronic music this way. It’s my art”.
I was fortunate enough to hear Antania’s unreleased demo 3AM and was enamored by its completely authentic, dark sound. It’s unpolished and brutal, Korn meets slayer type of bass riffs and Kali Mortem vocals are corse and menacing. 3AM is a powerful and chilling piece of music. The previous Antania album, last year’s The God Complex was compelling, but this unrelated demo is an improvement in every way. Antania sticks with the basic template from his previous album – a hybridization of industrial, bass music, and doom metal. But the compositions on 3AM are denser and more complex. The production is sharper, too.
It would be easy to lazily toss off comparisons between Antania and other industrial acts. Dr Luna and Kali Mortem demonstrate the same talent for crafting harsh yet melodic songs that Trent Reznor possesses; the slavering ugliness and sci-fi horror atmosphere recalls Skinny Puppy; the sparse futurism and twitchy mechanical grind is reminiscent of Godflesh; and Dr Luna, with his homemade electronic contraptions made from KAT Percussion, has to at least be considered a spiritual successor to serial killers that spend their days creating contraptions, like the movie The Cell. Art isn’t created in a vacuum, and the fact that Atania has some things in common with other bands doesn’t diminish the fact that 3AM will be a colossal release in 2025. It’s not strictly metal, but it’s heavy and disturbing like a nightmare you suddenly wake from but aren’t quite sure you fully escaped. You can hear bits and pieces of their demo on their instagram page. www.instagram.com/antaniaofficial