DEATH APPEAL Thermonucleareality / End State Cold Dehumanising Death Industrial from Melbourne's Underbelly. By Mark Jenkins.
DEATH APPEAL
Thermonucleareality / End State
Cold Dehumanising Death Industrial from Melbourne's Underbelly. By Mark Jenkins.
Melbourne's Death Appeal doesn't fuck around. In a scene saturated with laptop warriors and bedroom producers hiding behind walls of VSTs and digital comfort, L.M. strips everything back to the bone with gear that screams analog hostility. This is death industrial that earns its name through sheer sonic brutality and uncompromising vision.
THERMONUCLEAREALITY hits like radiation poisoning—slow, inevitable, and absolutely lethal. Recorded live in July 2025 and re-cut the following month, this isn't some polished studio abortion. This is raw documentation of industrial decay, captured through an Alesis SR-16, dual Korg Monotrons, and an arsenal of Behringer/Digitech processors that sound like they've been dragged through nuclear fallout. The Shure SM-57 picks up every harsh frequency, every grinding mechanical breath, every moment where the machines threaten to collapse under their own weight.
The production philosophy here is pure anti-comfort. No backing tracks beyond the drum machine. No safety nets. Just stereo'd destruction pumped straight into Reaper like a direct injection of industrial poison. Each track feels like witnessing the slow meltdown of civilisation through malfunctioning surveillance equipment. The delays create cavernous spaces filled with the ghosts of dead frequencies, while the reverb transforms every sound into echoes from abandoned factories.
L.M. understands that true death industrial isn't about shocking imagery or provocative samples—it's about creating genuine unease through sound design that feels genuinely threatening. These aren't compositions so much as sonic autopsies, dissecting the corpse of modern existence with surgical precision and zero empathy.
END STATE serves as the perfect precursor to this latest assault. Where some artists evolve by softening edges, Death Appeal has moved in the opposite direction—each release more punishing than the last. End State established the template: cold, mechanical, utterly devoid of human warmth. But Thermonucleareality perfects the formula, pushing the harsh electronics into genuinely unsettling territory.
The progression between releases shows an artist uninterested in commercial palatability or scene politics. This is outsider industrial in the truest sense—created in isolation, documented with minimal means, and distributed with zero compromise. The rough studio environment adds crucial texture; you can hear the room, the limitations of the gear, the very real physicality of someone wrestling with machines until they submit.
Death Appeal operates in that liminal space between power electronics and dark ambient where the most interesting work happens. There's rhythm here, but it's the rhythm of decay. There's melody, but it's the melody of systems failing. Most importantly, there's genuine menace—something increasingly rare in a genre that often mistakes volume for intensity.
In an era where harsh noise has become as formulaic as pop music, Death Appeal reminds us what genuine transgression sounds like. This isn't music for headphone contemplation or vinyl fetishisation. This is music for questioning everything you thought you knew about comfort, safety, and the machines that surround us.
Melbourne's industrial underground needed this. Hell, the entire global scene needed this. Death Appeal doesn't just make death industrial—they embody it.
ESSENTIAL LISTENING FOR: Anyone who thinks Genocide Organ went soft, followers of the Australian power electronics lineage, collectors of genuinely disturbing audio documents
RATING: Essential. This is why the underground exists.
OUT NOW:
ANTISOCIAL:
And: Music is not a commodity; it's a community. Your art should reflect your truth, not what others want to hear.
Ian MacKaye.
It’s like if you want to use this music purely as agro, then fine, because it is very fucking violent, aggressive music. It’s just that the common misconception is that I wanna go out there, or this music is made to go out there and fucking damage people. That’s the misconception.
Justin Broadrick, Godflesh
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