Destroy My Brains – WILT
Destroy My Brains – WILT
Self Release
Release date: 14/08/26
Review by: Jon Deaux
7/10
WILT is the musical equivalent of discovering your therapist is in the crowd at a Cannibal Corpse show scribbling away in a notebook.
Lloydminster is right smack dab on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border, a city so indecisive it required two provinces just to be itself. Destroy My Brains have been walking that line between concept album and mental breakdown for the past eight years, and on WILT, they simply stop trying and fall flat.
Their musical journey started with Worthless (not my review). Then came InsignifiCan’t, Lifeless, Tormented, and now WILT, completing the acronym that the band knew they were going to use before writing half the riffs. No band manages to keep the same drummer for eight years. Destroy My Brains decided that was the challenge.
But fortunately for us, the music is much heavier than the gimmick.
Destroy My Brains are devoted to worshiping at the cracked concrete altar of Crowbar and Eyehategod, but they are acutely aware of one thing that many sludge bands overlook: heaviness isn’t just a case of tuning lower than everybody else. It’s a matter of building tension. Jarret and Chase don’t hide each riff behind walls of distortion, but allow them to lumber forward with terrible inevitability. With each new repetition, they build a layer of psychological weight until the guitars no longer seem to be instruments but industrial machinery smashing old cars. Rob’s bass doesn’t support the song, but holds it down with tonnes of wet earth, while Jadan’s drumming never lets go of the riffs without constantly threatening to pass them.
‘OCI (Obsessive Compulsive Imploder)’ begins with a riff that seems to be verging on primitivism. But thanks to the power of repetition, they succeed in making the listener share the obsessions of the narrator. They take on OCD with all the compassion of a man who performs his own vasectomy using a Dremel. In the end, the narrator ends up inside a psychiatric institution, and it seems to be the most optimistic outcome of the entire album. Everyone else gets emotional cremation.
‘Burn the Virgin’ is a ten-minute ritual sacrifice that shifts from eerie melodies to sludge so gradually it’s impossible to pinpoint the moment when it happens. Doom bands often confuse “slow” for “interesting”. Fortunately, Destroy My Brains know the difference. Each new crawl forward adds up to increasing tension that erupts in the form of a collapsing bridge rather than the breakdown everybody expects. And the lyrics tell how cultists get drunk on what they did. I relate to those lyrics less than anybody else. But it’s one of the most believable lyrics I heard recently.
The centerpiece of the album is ‘Decontribute’, which sums up the entire Destroy My Brains philosophy: reject society, reject improvement, and reject the self-help industry along with it. The title riff walks forward with the certainty of someone resigning from a job he was fired from a couple of years ago. Jarret’s roar has lost any theatrical touch and sounds like someone sanding rust from his lungs.
‘Avulsion’ and ‘Downgrade’ demonstrate how well Destroy My Brains know how to pace their music compared to many of their peers. The first of them stretches despair in such a way that each new sustained chord physically exhausts the listener, while the second of them injects enough punk venom so that the album won’t just sink in its emotional weight. It’s still sludge, but this time it moves with purpose rather than just resting on your chest for seven minutes and hoping you won’t notice that numbness you feel.
And then ‘Spill’ comes, and suddenly all the jokes get themselves out of the room.
This is the emotional heart of the album, where the band confronts childhood abuse with a kind of ugliness that makes any horror-movie image elsewhere on the album pale in comparison. When Jarret repeats “I can’t feel… I don’t feel… I won’t feel… anything ever,” the riffs have already done the job. And by this point, I wasn’t reviewing an album anymore, but writing a character reference for the prosecution.
The eleven-minute title track avoids becoming a self-indulgence because the band never forgets about the riff. That’s the key to success throughout the entire WILT. However ugly the subject matter gets, the music evolves with it. Melodic leads emerge out of walls of distortion, grooves appear just in time to save from the monotony, and the ultimate crescendo feels earned rather than just loud. And there’s no way to write an eleven-minute doom epic that starts with “You destroyed the child within me” without having a problematic childhood. That would get you a Spotify playlist called Morning Coffee, not one of the best sludge records of the year.
What finally sells WILT is the absence of any pretention. Three out of four members work industrial jobs and struggle to manage their schedules in order to practice. And every live performance is a genuine once-a-year event because somebody’s work schedule got changed, not because that’s what creates a good marketing strategy. Here’s nothing that feels like carefully curated misery. It sounds like four men who ran out of energy to pretend anything, including hope, and recorded the album just for the sake of it.
The Wendigo on the cover symbolizes starvation, possession, and rot. Somehow, it’s the healthiest relationship on the album. At least the Wendigo eats other people. Destroy My Brains eat themselves and call it artistic progression.
WILT isn’t about reaching rock bottom. It’s about moving to rock bottom, renovating it, paying property taxes, and inviting neighbors to admire the damp. Luckily for us, they remember to bring riffs powerful enough to destroy the entire street.
Track list:
1. OCI (Obsessive Compulsive Imploder)
2. Burn The Virgin
3. Decontribute
4. Avulsion
5. Downgrade
6. Spill
7. Wilt
Links:
https://www.facebook.com/DMBdestroymybrians
https://www.youtube.com/@destroymybrains3883
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Jon Deaux and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
