If you’ve watched Meta-stasis’s video for Disintegrate (set in an abandoned St Albans psychiatric hospital) and wondered, ‘Was someone just rubbing a dildo?’, well… therein lies a tale.
“We scouted the place,” says masked keyboardist and sample-detonator Anonymous. “Some of it was boarded up. There were no birds in sight, no animals. It was all dead. We found a pile of belongings: a massive court case file, books on psychopaths, two passports, some bedding and clothing. And in among this was this wooden dildo, which I still have. It’s the band’s mascot now.”
Stepping across the threshold into Meta-stasis’s vivid take on electro-shocked, tech-death mayhem is to enter into a thrilling realm of chaos rarely seen in modern metal. This is the unruly stuff of life, death, personal bedlam and unrelenting catharsis – as frontman Solomon J Lucifer Christ puts it, “a self-fulfilling cycle of energy that never ends.”
Self-recorded with Cradle Of Filth producer Scott Atkins, the London/Brighton six-piece’s second album, The Paradox Of Metanoia, is an enraged labour of frustration. Driven by tribal clatter, bug-eyed rage and a drug-crazed, asylum-escapee aesthetic, this is a deeply personal quest that’s going to attract fans like the Pied Piper on PCP.
“This is a bible of my past five years,” says Solomon. “Each fucking tragedy that happened. Big things. Each song represents a different moment in time.”
Meta-stasis are a unified force, pooling shared experiences and emotions into a beast that’s more than the sum of its parts.
“We’re all fucking mentalists, you know?” Solomon adds. “Other people couldn’t handle the sickness. We’re unscrewed in the head and it’s like a puzzle we solve together. We are somehow drawn by madness into this project; that’s our common ground.”
“We tap into the way a lot of people are feeling right now,” Anonymous concludes. “Very angry, but also optimistic. You can’t have no hope; without hope you can’t fight.”
*THE PARADOX OF METANOIA *IS OUT NOW
