Today we’re releasing Maggots, our third major release since the inception of the band in 2022. We hope you’ll like it!
We’ve worked well over a year with this album and its accompanying movie, or music video collection, which premiered at the movie house Kaskad in Blackeberg one week ago.
On the record you’ll find six tracks which are quite different from one another but still tells a coherent story …
The anthemic opening song Portent bridges Maggots to our previous release Until We Fall and deals with the fleeting nature of life, the fear of death, and the very moment of death.
Experience is a dark, minimal, anxiety-ridden number about how ultimately, every person is alone in this life. The song ends with a glimmer of hope — this experience will carry you.
Thematically, Piglet may be even darker as it’s dealing with self-loathing and the consequences of low self-esteem, but the lyrical and actual video imagery adds a humorous layer to this song which has an almost nursery rhyme quality.
Machine breaks away from the doom and gloom with its slow but danceable EBM funk groove, industrial stabs of noise (is that a foghorn?) and bright melody line which adds a distinct, playful and robotic quality to a song that indeed deals with AI, droids and sex machines.
Fear, our industrial, synth-pop interpretation of the John Cale song Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend from 1974, may be the most odd number on the record. It’s a song that has been covered by many artists, however most of them of the singer-songwriter variety. We believe we successfully made it our own. Fear, anxiety, addiction — it’s all there, told with a cheerful melody, and ending in chaos.
The closing track Clean then brings us back to a sound similar to Experience, with themes from Portent. In between lines there’s a message about how playing it safe gets you nowhere in life. Clean was the last song we recorded for the album and it can also be seen as a little nod to ourselves for completing the project and coming out the other side with a more vulnerable, developed sound.
Maggots is available on vinyl, CD and for download.
It’s also available for streaming on Spotify and all other major platforms.
Please add it to a playlist!
Portent is available as a standalone music video.
The Maggots movie will be screened in other locations (suggestions are welcome!).
Stay tuned.
Greetings from Svaj.
Anders O Öhgren & Tomas Z Westberg
TZW Produktion
