Introducing Belgium's Doodseskader with new single 'Alive & Not Well'
The death squad marches on: Two years after entering the battlefield with their debut EP MMXX: Year Zero, Belgium’s Doodseskader are gearing up for their next fight with the release of their debut album Year One out 18th November via Isolation Records.
Translating to “death squad” in English, Doodseskader is made up of singer/bassist Tim De Gieter (Amenra, Every Stranger Looks Like You) and singer/drummer Sigfried Burroughs (Kapitan Korsakov, The K). Whilst Year Zero showed the two-piece struggling amid the turmoil, their album Year One is a victorious testament of tackling life’s obstacles head first. It is “the voice of the people we are at this very moment”, the duo comments. “We’ve stood up, found solutions and tried to head toward a new way of living. It’s about growing up, fighting your demons and giving them a place to rest. Now that all of that is said, we can move on.”
Today they share blistering new single ‘Alive & Not Well’.
On the track, vocalist/bassist Tim says, “‘Alive & Not Well’ is things clicking for us.It was half Sigfried, half me. Half of it describes us struggling, but half of it also is us grabbing misery by the throat and facing it head first. It’s the fifth song on the record and I feel like this is the point where things started shifting and we realised that while the record served as a document of our hardships and us trying to come to terms with the past we’d put on display in MMXX : Year Zero, from that point on it’d be us using our honesty and this band as both a weapon and an armour. “Forty fucking five, I wear the number like a vest”. Fortune gave us a shitty hand. Now we're slowly turning it into the fist that'll strike back.”
Watch / Listen to ‘Alive & Not Well’ HERE
The unique video was created by animator Anton Cla who used the lyrics to create an eclectic mediaeval universe with themes of sacrifice and suffering. Inspired by old Renaissance paintings and Polish folklore he 3D-scanned churches and playgrounds in his hometown Ghent, Belgium. To add more immersive richness to this universe he used a lot of photogrammetric scans of cultural heritage from international museums. This perfectionist and aesthetic sense of world building is prevalent in all his audiovisual work.
Though still a relatively young band, Year One opens a new artistic chapter for Doodseskader. They are a hip-hop act in one moment and a grunge band in the following, just to transform into a full-blown sludge or hardcore steamroller next. Sometimes they are all and sometimes none of the above – there’s no way to pin them down. “Being able to draw from different musical genres makes us who we are. There's no specific genre we’re looking at. Great songs are great songs. It’s craftsmanship.”
Further expanding their unique sonic palette, Doodseskader did not only look back to the great bands of the past for inspiration, but also made a conscious effort to discover fresh artists from all corners of the musical realm, sharing an open mindset with genre-defying trailblazers like Show Me The Body, Ghostemane, and Ho99o9. While they kept their trademark reverb-drenched bass sound, they incorporated more production details, many of them found in techno – adding even more depth and dynamic to their crushing mix.
Written in late 2020 and once again recorded by Tim De Gieter in Much Luv Studio (Amenra, Brutus, Absent In Body), Year One is as much a declaration of war as it is a declaration of independence: Doodseskader are here to cut their own path – and you better not stand in their way.
Year One is out 18th November via Isolation Records
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