Dystopiate — Filth Film as reviewed by Mark J. "Twenty-eight minutes of blackened d-beat crust that never lets up"
Dystopiate — Filth Film (I Heart Noise)
There's often a very distinctive kind of record that only gets made when a band is losing members faster than it can replace them, and Filth Film is that record. Dystopiate started life in December 2019 as Cody Maillet's project, coming off the back of Cryostasium, and by the time these sessions began, the lineup had already been through one drummer's sudden exit and a frantically assembled 2024 full-length, Terminal Dissonance, recorded under time pressure with help from outside players just to get something finished.
Filth Film was supposed to be different — a real studio record, everything written fresh rather than old material re-tracked in a hurry. Then guitarist Andrew Martin quit mid-process, and Dystopiate went from a four-piece to two people: Maillet on bass and vocals, Tom Preziosi handling every guitar track and running the whole session out of his own home studio, Studio Dystope, in Massachusetts, across the better part of 2025. However, this phenomenal record doesn't sound like a band running on fumes. It sounds like one that got meaner because it had to.
Twenty-eight minutes of blackened d-beat crust that never lets up, the ten-track record opens with its title cut establishing the terms immediately — blistering d-beat drumming and a wall of cymbals crashing against Maillet's vocals, which read less like performance and more like a man venting genuine fury at the world than anything resembling conventional singing. Pure vitriol and malicious intent are an understatement. Infiltrator opens with a chopped, martial drum pattern before collapsing into full hardcore chaos, a trick the record leans on more than once to devastating effect, while Lysergic goes the other direction entirely, leaning into minor-key dissonance for something closer to a bad trip than a riff — genuinely unsettling rather than just heavy.
What's smart about Filth Film is that it knows when to let a track breathe before it detonates again. Futile briefly drops out into a few seconds of almost dead air mid-song before charging back in, and that restraint does more for tension than wall-to-wall blast ever could. Burn, Lurking Inside, and You're Next carry the record's most confrontational writing — Maillet has described You're Next as aimed at anyone or anything standing between a person and moving forward, and it plays that way, a direct address rather than an abstraction. The abrasive genre lines between old-school English punk/crust and blazing Japanese Gauze/GISM/Framtid hardcore are all blurred in a band that wears its influences on its sleeves, whilst completely sounding original and ominously dynamic. And in the middle of all that grimness, Whistlin' Dixie is the record's one genuine curveball — a lighter, more headbanging cut built around a made-up story about a woman's strange night out, proof this band hasn't lost its sense of humour even while everything around them was falling apart.
Atrophy is the closest thing here to a thesis statement, blackened riffing dissolving into hardcore fury and back again before the track drains out into tunnel-like effects and clanging metal — a song Maillet's said he takes dead seriously, about the slow rot everyone's quietly enduring. And easily one of the finest tracks on this nasty masterpiece. Across most tracks is a slight but significant black metal(in a thrashy way) influence that gives that extra gutpunch to the whole spiteful focus of this release.
The production is worth dwelling on, because it's doing more work than a home-studio record has any right to. Preziosi tracked, mixed, and mastered Filth Film himself inside Studio Dystope, and rather than sanding down the rough edges that a commercial facility might have smoothed over, he's leaned into them — there's a claustrophobic, pressed-right-up-against-the-amp quality to the guitars that a bigger studio budget would probably have engineered right out of the record. The LP pressing went to Angel Marcloid for the final master, a smart pairing given her own pedigree bending genre signals into something feral under the Fire-Toolz banner, and it shows: the low end has weight without turning to mud, and the record's dirtier textures still read as intentional rather than accidental.
It's also worth clocking where this record landed. I Heart Noise isn't a crust or d-beat label by trade — dig through their catalogue, and you're as likely to find noise pop, post-punk, and left-field electronic compilations as you are anything remotely blackened. That's a genuinely odd home for a band this feral, but it tracks with the label's own pitch of putting out records that are "a little different," and it says something about how porous Boston's underground actually is that a label built on experimental leanings would be the one to catch this. Maillet's talked about the city's scene in blunter terms — not a lack of bands thriving so much as a lack of bands willing to push things forward, name-checking the likes of Psycho, Rancorous, Abhorred, and Verminizer as the ones still doing the actual work. Filth Film reads like a document of a band trying to be one of those names.
Set against Filth Film, the band's back catalogue makes the leap obvious. 2024's Terminal Dissonance was, by Maillet's own account, essentially old Dystopiate material re-recorded in a studio under time pressure with a hired-gun drummer — a record built to survive a lineup collapse rather than to say something new. Filth Film is the first time Dystopiate have had the chance to write an album as an album, front to back, on their own terms, and the difference is audible in the pacing and the confidence of the sequencing alone. Losing a guitarist mid-process should have set them back to square one again. Instead, it produced their most focused and most purely them record yet.
This is a record born out of attrition, not ambition, and that's exactly why it works. Dystopiate didn't have the luxury of a grand plan. They just kept not stopping — and by the sound of it, they're already onto whatever comes next, reportedly deep into a run of DEVO covers as a palate cleanser before the next proper record.
Crusty, vile d-beat hardcore is unbeatable to this writer, and the noxious flavours and glorious venom this band delivers are essential worship documents!!!.
Buy all this band's works-they are amazing, and we will hopefully have an interview soonish!!!
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