‘No mires, yo busco tú bien, Siente mi mano nunca espero que lo entiendas, Te quiero y un abrazo fiel, Cierra los ojos testimonio de la historia’ (Hambre) / ‘Don’t look, I seek your well-being, Feel my hand, understanding’s not required, I love you, and this embrace is true, Close your eyes, a testament to our story’ (Hunger)

El Animal Humano (The Human Animal) is the debut album from Berlin-based Derrumbe (Collapse).  The band’s roots are in dense, mid-paced hardcore that draws on both Latin American and Eastern European influences, but so austere and restrained is the palette that there is almost a doom metal aesthetic at play.

The demonically barked vocals conjure bleakly allusive themes that reflect the band’s personal experiences during the Covid pandemic.  Side one reflects the uncertainty and anxiety of that period with the band consciously resisting any unnecessary adornment, relying instead on subtle rhythmic shifts.  Such is the spartan, breathless intensity that it emerges as almost a single, unbroken movement.

As side two unfolds, Derrumbe gradually become more expansive, allowing a greater sense of space and fleeting melodic flourishes to emerge, without diluting the darkly claustrophobic atmosphere.  This captures the hope that they felt as the pandemic ended.  Not in the sense that a better world would somehow organically evolve.  But rather in the personal realisations that it had provoked in respect of the social inequities that the virus had so explicitly revealed.