DEAD NEANDERTHALS - Flesh Is Fragile

"Flesh Is Fragile". With that declaration Dead Neanderthals dodge the responsibilty for peeling off your skin and boiling what's underneath with their music. Just like a professional boxer who tells you "nasal bones really snap like twigs", before he punches your face into oblivion.

DEAD NEANDERTHALS - Flesh Is Fragile (LP) (2026)

On their latest album the hardest working duo in Dutch Avantgarde Extreme Music pretty much continues the concept of the "Demo MMXXV" EP from the beginning of the year: No endless meditations and improvisations, but instead a whole bunch of actual songs. Completely gnarly misanthropic songs consisting of brutal primitive Metal drumming, ultra-distorted keyboards, unhinged desperately howling screams and subsonic gutturals, but songs nonetheless.

These songs - in combination with the "Demo" tracks were actually written for Dead Neanderthals' memorable Roadburn 2026 performance, where Rene Aquarius and Kokke took the Hall of Fame by apocalyptic storm.

Dead Neanderthals live at Roadburn 2026

Compared to the previous EP "Flesh Is Fragile" actually sounds both punchier and cleaner, but that's of course one of the most relative facts you'll find on my whole blog. So if you're an audiophile taking my word as an invitation to use the record as a text object to calibrate your system, you're in for a Darwin-award-worthy departure. No, in its short running time of barely over half an hour this beast does everything to do song titles like "We Will Meet Again In a Sea of Flames", "Hollowed-Out Existence", "A Leather Body Bag for the Mass Grave Called Society" or "Buried in a Shallow Grave" justice, both in performance and production.

Yeah, this is a ridiculously brutal fucker - but somehow also weirdly magnetic and hypnotic, as it sucks us into its nihilistic spiral of pummeling weltschmerz. That's it, humanity! We're officially done now.