Today’s Ask The Artist feature belongs to VISCERA///, an Italian post-metal entity that has spent more than two decades turning heaviness into something unstable, hallucinatory, and deeply unhappy about the state of your nervous system.
Formed in 2000 and split between Cremona and Piacenza, VISCERA/// began in goregrind territory before mutating into a far stranger organism: sludge, drone, post-metal, psychedelia, industrial weight, grindcore violence, dark wave shadows, and clean vocals drifting through the wreckage like someone singing from inside a condemned building.
Now the band returns with 4. Assets For Psychedelic Warfare, their first full-length in nine years, arriving July 24 via Time To Kill Records.
Naturally, we asked them a very important question.
The Question
“If your music was a weather forecast, what would it be?”
VISCERA/// answer:
“We are not alike any specific weather condition, just the one that ruins your plans and makes your day more miserable.”
Honestly, fair.
Some bands are rain.
Some bands are fog.
VISCERA/// are the forecast that makes you cancel the picnic, distrust the sky, and wonder why the horizon is making that sound.
Now onto today’s disturbance.
VISCERA/// have unleashed “Autoberserk,” the latest single from 4. Assets For Psychedelic Warfare, and it fits the band’s answer almost too well. This is not music built to brighten the room. This is music built to make the room question its own structural integrity.
The track comes from a record described as the band’s most extreme plunge yet into their psychedelic and gloomy vision. That does not mean “psychedelic” in the loose, colorful, festival-poster sense. This is psychedelia with rust under its nails, staring at the wall too long, waiting for the pattern to start breathing.
Across the new material, VISCERA/// push their sound into harsher and stranger territory, dragging industrial metal’s glacial heaviness into contact with black metal urgency, grindcore abrasion, and dark wave atmosphere. The band’s increased use of clean vocals only makes the whole thing more unsettling, like a human voice trying to remain calm while the machinery behind it catches fire.
“Autoberserk” feels like a warning siren stretched into a ritual. It lurches, burns, and folds inward, carrying the band’s familiar rawness while making room for something colder and more spectral.
That has always been the strange power of VISCERA///. Even when the music is ugly, it is never careless. Even when it grinds itself down to bone, there is still shape, intention, and a miserable kind of beauty crawling through the debris.
4. Assets For Psychedelic Warfare arrives July 24 via Time To Kill Records.
Cancel your plans accordingly.