On March 21st internationally, Purity Through Fire is proud to present Aurora Disease’s third album, Epitaph, on digipack CD format. The vinyl version will follow later this year.
Aurora Disease was first founded by Antisozial in the year 2015 in Germany. As a one-man black metal band, it primarily had psychedelic rock and DSBM influences. The main idea of the music was to transmit psychedelic experiences in the form of meditative music and repetitive sounds in order to create an impression of monotony and melancholy.
As Samuel (Overdös) and Degenerate joined the band in early 2016, Aurora Disease became more than just a project. They started making music together and coincidentally came across Negative, who agreed to join on guitars. Thus, with the lineup of Antisozial on guitars and vocals, Degenerate on drums, Samuel (Overdös) on bass and speech, and Negative (Urge) on guitars and backing vocals, they wrote music together and performed their first live shows during 2016. After eight months, they had written about 21 songs that have never been officially recorded or released anywhere, for now.
Later on, as a result of the sudden death of Samuel (Overdös), Aurora Disease decided to split up, at least for a certain time. By the time they had planned to come together and start the recordings of the songs they wrote in the past, Degenerate died of an overdose in February 2017 and Negative then left the band. Antisozial decided to continue Aurora Disease by himself, returning to the original one-man black metal project as it was in the beginning.
However, do not linger under the assumption that Antisozial’s work is by any means cliche „one-man black metal.“ Considering it instead Urban Depressive Black Metal, he poignantly proved his outside-the-box thinking with 2018’s Burial of Self and more so 2022’s Me, You & the Nothing. Explaining his demi-tag, „It should mainly reflect the monotony of everyday life in a bleak city soaked with drug addiction and mental illnesses without exaggerating the negativity according to the standards of the DSBM scene. Everything that I do, unfortunately, is nothing but the reality of my everyday life and the ugliness that surrounds us.“
Saving the best for last, perhaps, Aurora Disease returns with its third and potentially final album, Epitaph. Suitably adorned with literally vivid cover art, Epitaph is a weird & wild plunge into the darkest corners of Antisozial’s mind. No idea, no construct, no texture, no twist of the tonsil nor string – nothing here is too „out there“ to be mangled and malformed to suit Aurora Disease’s needs. And yet, for however fever-dreaming intense (or at least schizophrenically shapeshifting) Epitaph gets, there’s perversely a sense of…beauty here. Beauty buried at the bottom of a smokestack, or moldering in a gutter or the deepest layer of a landfill, or even in plain view, bloody and lifeless on the concrete – but beauty all the same. Much / all of that can be contributed to Antisozial’s panoramic approach to songwriting; equally and exceptionally skilled at every instrument, he allows his prodigious chops to guide each song’s emotional center, building it up high or bringing it down low, all at once or in eerie quietude. His vocals, in kind, span the tortured and the suave, almost inhabiting different characters along the way as the post-everything black metal roils all around him. And yes: there’s saxophone in more than one spot on Epitaph.
Aesthetic touchstones could include the likes of early Solefald, Ephel Duath, or especially the 2000s work of Manes, but that doesn’t quite complete the picture of Aurora Disease at present. His is a maudlin, tempestuous world, and one that’s simultaneously inviting and frightening. So, if this truly is Antisozial’s Epitaph, let it reverberate across every doomed cityscape.
