Dead Senses Rages Against the Toxin of Contemporary Capitalism on Caustic Noise Rock Single “Strozzapreti”

Los Angeles-based, experimental post-punk band Dead Senses released its self-titled album through Already Dead Tapes and Records on November 17, 2023. To mark that occasion the group dropped a music video for the single “Strozzapreti” edited by the band itself using public domain footage to give the visual presentation of the song the same fascinatingly out of phase quality possessed by the song itself. The title means “priest strangler” or “priest choker” in Italian and one wishes that were the title of a modern, and return to enthralling and unsettling, Dario Argento film. But the term usually refers to a thick, ropey pasta except in the song it references, according to its press release, “a quiet, seething anger toward abusive authority, violence, and omnipresent demand for consumption and submission under contemporary capitalism.” A feeling presumably most of us share at this point even if some of us misguidedly overtly support the agenda and values of late stage capitalism because that support is so internalized it manifests in identifying with conservative politics or “centrist” neoliberalism transmuted into what is presumed to being a self-identified “moderate” with no sense of irony. Dead Senses makes no bones about dissolving those narratives in the song in style, structure, its use of imagery and in mulching cultural artifacts to repurpose into thrillingly furious agitprop.

The members of Dead Senses came out of the metal and hardcore scenes and “Strozzapreti” bears of the hallmarks of those roots with pointed, and aggressive rhythms and noisy guitar, bass, percussion and shouted, desperate blasts of vocals. But the production also feels like the people in the band has been listening to a lot of industrial music and other musical forms in which the aesthetic is heavily samples based to give the whole sound of the piece an intentionally stark and direct sound. The rest of the album reveals the group’s free use of atmospheric elements that flow into angular noise rock that fans of modern noise rock outfits like Meat Wave, Moon Pussy and Chat Pile will appreciate not just for the caustic and exhilarating sounds but also the righteous substance of what the music is about. Watch the video for “Strozzapreti” on YouTube and follow Dead Senses at the links provided.