Thereâs something perversely satisfying about music that sounds like itâs decomposing as you listen – fibrous, overgrown, festering with weight and mood. Colonize, the sophomore full-length from Belgian post-industrial mystics MoldEra, doesnât so much play as it expands, seeps, and then collapses into itself. Itâs the sound of fertile decay, a sonic loam fed by the nutrient-rich rot of genre forebears and filtered through a uniquely European strain of existential malaise.
This isnât your typical stoner doom record with endless Iommi worship and bong-rip filler. Colonize trades in something heavier – less celebratory, more claustrophobic. Thereâs a reverent nod to Yobâs endurance-test dynamics, Isisâ layered tectonics, and even the dreamy abrasion of early Deftones or the tragic melodicism of Dirt-era Alice in Chains, but MoldEra aren’t content to ride coattails. This is a band that clearly spent years marinating in their own slow-cooked broth of pandemic-era disillusionment and post-industrial hauntology. What they’ve extracted here is thick, pungent, and totally unsanitized.
Where 2022âs Waste Pile Dunes hinted at potential, Colonize sounds like the moment that potential breaks free from its host and begins to spread – intelligently, methodically. The production is crusty but intentional, retaining enough grime to feel organic without tipping into sludge-for-sludgeâs-sake territory. The guitars are massive but never monolithic – riffs emerge like ruined structures through the fog, draped in feedback and riddled with delicate fractures. Drums pummel in that slow-motion avalanche way, heavy on the floor tom and dripping with restraint. Bass doesnât underpin so much as it erodes, dragging everything downward in deliberate spirals.
Vocally, Zanatta sidesteps the genre clichĂ©s of caveman bellows or celestial crooning, instead delivering lines with a world-weary snarl that splits the difference between Layne Staleyâs haunted harmonies and Aaron Turnerâs declarative sermons. Lyrically, itâs bleak but lucid – an indictment of our techno-fetishistic death drive, played out across collapsing ecologies and scorched psychic landscapes. Yet thereâs a strange hope embedded in the rot: the idea that decay is also a form of renewal. Fungi eat the dead and return them to the soil. Mold survives where little else can.
Structurally, the album ebbs and flows with a kind of microbial intelligence. Songs donât build to crescendos so much as they thicken, coalesce, and then rupture. There are long, atmospheric passages that lean into the post-metal tradition, but unlike the cinematic sterility that mars much of that scene today, MoldEra keeps it raw, human, and infected. Every ambient swell feels like itâs growing something underneath – spores, maybe. Memories. Resistance.
You could throw the âprogressive sludgeâ label at this and it would mostly stick, but itâd also undersell the bandâs fluidity. MoldEra operates less like a genre band and more like an ecosystem. Their sound is messy, adaptive, and attuned to both historical weight and contemporary anxiety. The influences are all traceable, sure – Sleepâs hypnotic repetition, King Buffaloâs psych-drone float, even an echo of European post-hardcore in the dynamics – but Colonize feels lived-in in a way few second albums do.
At a time when too much heavy music chases algorithmic attention spans or gets trapped in its own niche purity tests, Colonize sprawls defiantly. It wants you to sit with it. It wants to breathe its mycelial breath into your headphones. And if you let it, it just might make you feel something again – not triumph, not despair, but that complex, unresolved middle space where real art tends to fester.
In short: this oneâs not just worth the time. It demands it. And it repays you in layers. MoldEra may be underground, but Colonize proves theyâre not buried. Theyâre blooming. Slowly. Relentlessly.
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Released by Octopus Rising on June 6th, 2025
Music source for review â Grand Sounds PR
