SNORLAX – Toxic Current

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  SNORLAX
• Duration: 00:31:08
• Available from: 10/07/2026
• Label:

• Unorthodox Emanations

The one undertaken by Brendan Auld and his very personal Snorlax project has always been a changing path devoted to contamination and experimentation, capable of filling the musical spaces of his records with all the stylistic passions that crowd the creative pen of the young Australian musician.
If the debut “II” loudly declared the one-man band's love for death metal, understood in its most overwhelming and massive form, the second work “The Necrotic Abyss” marked a sharp turn towards the acid realms of black metal, where dissonances and dark atmospheric passages gained importance and showed us a side only glimpsed until then in Snorlax's growing discography.

Another three years, and Auld is back in the spotlight, reworking his creation again and returning partly to the elements of the past, partly adding new ones taken violently from the fertile soil of the most feral and fast grindcore. For example, the return to a thicker and heavier sound, the overabundance of hyper-fast shots, the high number of songs with very short duration and the entire anti-capitalist concept that underlies “Toxic Current” unambiguously underline the interest of the sole member of the project towards this segment of extreme music, naturally diluted to the death and black metal instances which do not disappear in this album, but are significantly scaled down compared to the past.
One could randomly fire into the fray, and cite an “Eclipse” rather than a “De-Evolution” to indicate the absolute fluency in constructing very urgent and enveloping plots, capable of compressing musical developments that are anything but obvious into the space of a few minutes and which make the mixture of genres their distinctive trait.
In fact, if grind remains the clearest interpretation with which to interpret the aforementioned songs or the two covers “Puppet Fuck” and “Pigs” (by Agents of Abhorrence and The Fevered respectively), death metal instances emerge forcefully in “Into The Void” or Merchants Of Opulence”, instead leaving room for old existential anxieties with a harsh and malignant flavor with “Manifestation” and “1984”, designed to explicitly recall the black taste metal from the previous album.
As can therefore be seen, the thirty-one minutes of “Toxic Current” certainly have no time for moments of boredom or stasis, enclosing a compositional fury that goes well with the new grind character it possesses.
If up until now, in fact, we found Brendan's way of arranging songs excellent but somewhat hasty, this new, more visceral nature better justifies the sudden developments, according to an intelligent work and with intentions more aligned with the sound material actually presented.

Snorlax's new work promises to be an explosive grind bomb with a devastating impact, but capable of leaving clear traces after its passage thanks to melodic and atmospheric after-effects that are not entirely immediate and capable of returning to mind only after repeated and careful listening.
Something is still missing to call it a masterpiece: a certain sense of latent smallness at a general level remains, an excessive desire to 'cut it short' when faced with ideas that would require – and indeed, invite – more studied and refined evolutions, but it is impossible not to notice a growing improvement that is leading the boy towards increasingly closer shores of excellence.