MACHINE FLESH ASCENDANT Black Magnet - Megamantra Federal Prisoner | 25 minutes of surgical brutality as reviewed by Mark Jenkins.
MACHINE FLESH ASCENDANT
Black Magnet - Megamantra
Federal Prisoner | 25 minutes of surgical brutality as reviewed by Mark Jenkins.
The machines are singing hymns of apocalypse again, and Black Magnet's third album Megamantra is their most focused sermon yet. Oklahoma City's industrial metal prophets have shed whatever fat remained on their mechanized skeleton, delivering nine tracks of refined terror that burrow into your cerebral cortex and set up permanent residence.
Where 2020's Hallucination Scene was a sprawling nightmare and 2022's Body Prophesy felt like controlled chaos, Megamantra is laser-guided destruction. These aren't just songs—they're precision strikes against complacency, each track a perfectly calibrated dose of synthetic venom that hits harder because it knows exactly where to bite.
"Wound Signal" kicks the door down with the subtlety of a sledgehammer through glass, but it's the controlled burn of "Endless" that truly showcases the band's evolved approach. Black Magnet describes their sound as "a fusion of industrial metal, noise, and electronic body music filtered through a lens of post-apocalyptic paranoia," and never has that description felt more accurate. The track builds like a panic attack in reverse—starting frantic and somehow becoming more unsettling as it finds its groove.
"Better Than Love" immediately establishes itself as a future live staple, its hypnotic pulse owing as much to classic EBM as it does to the crushing weight of Godflesh. This is where Black Magnet's expanded sonic palette really shows—they're pulling from a broader well of influences while maintaining their core industrial metal DNA. The band states that the foundation draws from Godflesh and Meathook Seed, as well as EBM sounds of Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Skinny Puppy, with influences ranging from Deftones and Alice in Chains.
The album's midpoint crusher "Spitting Glass" and "Coming Back Again" showcase the band's knack for dynamic tension. Coming Back Again features "a juxtaposition of dense industrial noise and delicately picked notes that keeps things interesting." It's this kind of textural sophistication that separates Megamantra from the industrial metal pack—Black Magnet understands that true heaviness comes not from constant assault, but from the spaces between the strikes.
"Null + Void" strips everything down to its most essential elements before "Night Tripping" emerges as perhaps the album's most immediately memorable moment. "Night Tripping" features "something akin to an early Marilyn Manson vocal as it keeps the metal mostly at arms-reach," and that restraint pays dividends. When the track finally unleashes its full fury, it feels earned rather than obligatory.
The closing tandem of "Birth" and "Smokeskreen" provides the perfect denouement—the former a meditation on creation through destruction, the latter a haze of synthetic smoke that obscures as much as it reveals. At just over 25 minutes, Megamantra knows when to leave the party, understanding that in 2025's attention-deficit landscape, impact matters more than endurance.
The album encompasses several styles of music, keeping it alive and constantly moving, including Punk, Sludge, Industrial, and Hardcore, remaining harsh and infectious at the same time. But what sets this apart from their previous work is the surgical precision with which these elements are deployed. Every electronic squeal, every crushing riff, every mechanised beat serves the greater whole. And it doesn't have the dullness vocally of the overated band known as Health.
In 2025's landscape of tech-crutched social class and unconsented algorithmic influence, industrial metal deserves a sonic resurgence, and Black Magnet is leading that charge from America's heartland. This is industrial metal that sounds like a swarm of killer androids fashioned from junkyard materials—brutal, yes, but crafted with the kind of attention to detail that separates art from mere aggression.
Megamantra finds Black Magnet at their most confident and focused. They've taken the lessons learned from their first two albums and distilled them into something purer, more potent. This is industrial metal for the post-truth era—paranoid, precise, and absolutely essential.
In a genre that often mistakes volume for violence, Black Magnet understands that the real terror comes from the machine that knows exactly what it's doing.
Essential Tracks: Endless, Better Than Love, Night Tripping and Spitting Glass.
For Fans Of: Nine Inch Nails, Godflesh, Author & Punisher, Full of Hell.
Damage Assessment: 9.5/10
Megamantra is available now via Federal Prisoner.
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