David Thrussell interview: ‘The deeper I dig, the more I realise the less I know’
David Thrussell discusses Snog, Black Lung and the ritual LP “The Reign Of Dead Matter” ahead of Fourscher Festival shows in Erfurt on November 7-8.
David Thrussell has spent more than three decades using electronic music as something far more than entertainment. With Snog, songs, hooks and dancefloor structures have carried satire and observations about consumerism, obedience, power and mediated reality; Black Lung has provided a darker, harder and more abstract space for exploring technology, control, ritual and systems operating beneath the visible surface. His work with Soma, spoken word and more recent ritual recordings has extended those questions into increasingly different forms.
2026 makes those parallel strands particularly visible. Thrussell released the ritual work “The Reign Of Dead Matter” under his own name, recorded live at the Melbourne Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and joined Darrin Verhagen of Shinjuku Thief for “The Call Of Cthulhu”, a spoken-word and sound-design interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft. A new Black Lung album, “Ordo Ab Chao”, is also imminent, having been recorded live in Paris as a commissioned Masonic soundscape.
European audiences will also have a rare opportunity to see both principal sides of Thrussell’s work almost consecutively. Snog and Black Lung confirmed their only European shows of 2026 at Fourscher Festival in Erfurt: Snog perform on Saturday, November 7, while Black Lung appear on Sunday, November 8.
In this conversation with Side-Line, Thrussell discusses why he increasingly distrusts digital technology, whether subversion can still survive once everything becomes content, the different functions of Snog and Black Lung, ritual as something music can perform rather than merely represent, and why his search for answers has only made the questions larger.
David Thrussell interview
Side-Line: This year you have released work under your own name, collaborated with Shinjuku Thief on “The Call Of Cthulhu”, and are now preparing a new Black Lung album, “Ordo Ab Chao”. These projects are very different in form, but they all seem concerned with systems that are larger than the individual, whether ritual, myth, technology or hidden structures. Do you see them as separate investigations, or are they all circling the same question from different directions?
David Thrussell: Vast cosmic currents surround us and course through us. The so-called ‘occult’ is everywhere and nowhere. Indeed, it is so omniscient that we simply cannot see it. Like asking a fish to describe water, we are often unable to cognate that which animates, directs and controls us. Perhaps, one clear clue is the unified ‘voice’ of the anti-human media and political structure, they incessantly bellow, as a mandatory dogma, that life itself is an aberration, an accident, meaningless and purely material, so you can be sure that all of these statements are the opposite of true. “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” Personally, I don’t have a plan. The decision to pursue a project arrives from a combination of instinct, synchronicity and fate. If the winds of inspiration, concepts and personalities coalesce, so be it. It is true, I’m still trying to ask the right questions. The how? and the why? of when and where we are.
Side-Line: With Snog, you spent years examining consumerism, obedience, spectacle and the absurdities of modern power through songs that were often catchy enough to enter the very systems they criticised. In 2026, when critique itself is immediately turned into content, branding and engagement, has satire become harder to make genuinely disruptive?
David Thrussell: Indeed, there is now so much noise, so much competition for fleeting attentions, that it seems counterintuitive, disingenuous (or even immoral) to attempt to even enter the zone. You appear to be correct; subversion has now largely become labelled as another consumer product. Perhaps the sanest approach will be to simply walk away from the whole mad machine or at least deny it the power and dignity of your engagement. As a closet Luddite, I have a deep and instinctual suspicion of technology and the extraordinary power it appears to have (or represent). Indeed, I have proposed a theory that digital technology behaves or manifests as a life form, it seeks dominion, resources and territory just like any other life form. Parasitic organisms are not uncommon in nature, and it would be logical to suggest that digital technologies have been engaged in a symbiotic relationship with humankind. Just as we observe in the natural world, parasitic life forms often kill the host or abandon it when it is no longer useful. Just saying.
Side-Line: Snog’s strength has always been that the songs can function on two levels at once: as music people can physically enjoy, and as texts that may become increasingly uncomfortable once you actually listen to what is being said. Do you still believe the dancefloor can be a political or intellectual space, or has that idea changed for you over time?
David Thrussell: I think I still believe it is theoretically possible. Of course, there are multiple competing narratives at any given time. On the surface, our society appears to be in a race to the bottom. I have often proposed that ‘Idiocracy’ is one of my favourite documentaries. But there are also many other possibilities. How it eventually plays out, I can’t really predict. Humanity has many strengths and many weaknesses. Nature seeks an equilibrium. But my instinct tells me that we are in an undeclared war against non-human forces.
Side-Line: There has not been a new full Snog album since “Eight Offerings For The Undead”, while your recent creative energy has moved strongly through Black Lung, spoken-word work and ritual material. Is Snog currently waiting for the right subject, or has the project itself become something you now approach differently?
David Thrussell: Snog has always been focussed on songs and songwriting. When the songs manifest from the aether, we make a new record, circumstances permitting. I can’t see an advantage in forcing the issue. Right now, gnosis appears to desire to remain unspoken.
Side-Line: The title “Ordo Ab Chao” immediately introduces the old tension between order and chaos. Black Lung has often seemed to work precisely in that unstable zone, where structure is present but never completely secure. On this record, are you more interested in imposing order on chaos, or in discovering that what we call order may simply be one temporary arrangement of it?
David Thrussell: Yes, Black Lung often teeters on the brink of structure and chaos (or noise). The new Black Lung album “Ordo Ab Chao” acknowledges this tension and seeks to channel it into dialogue or even understanding. Recorded live in private concert June 21, 2026, at the Temple des 33, Paris, France, “Ordo Ab Chao” presents a Masonic perspective and indeed was commissioned as a Masonic soundscape to celebrate this fundamental and universal tension. While the world appears to be in steep and irreversible descent into chaos, there are forces just outside your vision that direct, manifest and profit from this era of apparent confusion.
Side-Line: Black Lung and Snog are often described as two different sides of your work, one more song-based and satirical, the other harder, darker and more abstract. But after so many years, do those boundaries still help you creatively, or do the projects increasingly contaminate one another?
David Thrussell: Just as people are (or at least were) unique expressions of a universal consciousness, so Snog and Black Lung are simply different expressions of the same underlying concepts, instincts and provocations.
Side-Line: “The Reign Of Dead Matter” was recorded live at midnight at the Melbourne Lodge of the Theosophical Society and described as ritual music, not simply music inspired by ritual. That distinction is fascinating. What changes when sound is no longer meant to represent an idea or emotion, but is intended to actually do something, to alter attention, space or consciousness?
David Thrussell: The LP “The Reign Of Dead Matter” was implicitly designed to function as the antithesis of popular music. Popular music is a spell cast by a vast and malevolent machine. Its purpose is to enslave, bewitch, benumb and distract. To create legions of soulless androids beholden to an occult project. It has been remarkably successful. “The Reign Of Dead Matter” has the very opposite intent, to action an acknowledgement of the dead, materialistic adversary and ennoble the struggle against the dark, dead void.
Side-Line: There is a recurring tension in your recent work between extremely old structures of meaning, myth, ritual, occult systems, Lovecraft, and very contemporary anxieties around technology, atomisation and information overload. Do you think older myths survive because human fears remain fundamentally the same, or because modernity keeps inventing new machinery for very ancient anxieties?
David Thrussell: Humankind has been robbed of our past. The history of humankind, our world and our place in it has been deliberately obscured, forged and forgotten. Traumatised by a repeating cycle of cataclysm, we are trapped in a holographic shopping mall/Hell created by arch puppeteers and secret societies, like lost children wandering through a ghostly, abandoned amusement park. Howard Phillips Lovecraft may have at times denied a spiritual outlook, but intuitively he understood the false phantasm that masquerades as human ‘society’ with its empty rituals of consumption and obedience. And the deep, dark past that lurks just beyond the glitz and banality of the mall/cathedral. We are indeed children, innocents who guilelessly frolic like carefree ‘Eloi’ as the shadowy ‘Morlocks’ plot and scheme just beneath our feet, just out of our vision. We are the instruments of our own doom, though we rarely glimpse it.
Side-Line: With “The Call Of Cthulhu”, the voice becomes almost architectural. It is not merely carrying text; it determines scale, pacing and psychological pressure. After working so extensively with spoken language rather than conventional song, has that changed the way you think about the human voice inside Snog or Black Lung?
David Thrussell: No doubt it is a cliche to describe the voice as just another instrument. Perhaps it is more constructive to describe the human voice as an “ultra-instrument,” part of the sonic landscape of course, but also capable (in theory, at least) of another layer of cultural messaging, text, literature, history and meaning. Some of the problem arises because the human voice, like almost everything, has become commodified, stripped of meaning and rendered into an artefact of “entertainment”, that most hollow of cultural objects. A battle rages, as we witness the struggle for human connection and meaning inside music, art and literature, so that signifies the deeper conflict between life and the silicon realm.
Side-Line: You have spent decades writing about systems of control, manipulation, consumption and mediated reality. Is there any idea you held twenty or thirty years ago that you now think you got fundamentally wrong, or at least underestimated? I’m interested less in whether the world confirmed your earlier work than in where experience has forced you to revise yourself.
David Thrussell: Indeed, I once fell to the common misapprehension that it was “all about the money”, now I look deeper and see that corporations, materialism and the black magic of the “money system” are merely superficial manifestations of a deeper, more Lovecraftian, more ancient malaise. A conflict that we are largely unconscious of, but are, in fact, surrounded by.
Side-Line: Snog and Black Lung will both appear at Fourscher Festival, on different days, in what are billed as their only European shows of 2026. That creates an unusual situation where an audience can encounter two very different musical identities from the same person almost side by side. Do you want those performances to underline the distance between Snog and Black Lung, or might the festival reveal how much they actually belong to the same internal world?
David Thrussell: Snog and Black Lung are very different manifestations of the same questions. Snog are like the valiant orchestra on the deck of the Titanic, as the ship goes down, we are here to enlighten, elucidate and educate but also to present nursery rhymes and hymns, fables and absurdist comedic relief. A Weimar Cabaret act that chronicles the last moments of the good ship as it plunges under the occult waves. Black Lung creates something different, the soundtrack to the mass ritual that we live every day, the grind of the hungry machine, the delirious demon that wraps its fetid tendrils around our minds and spirits. Summoning demons in order to cast demons out. As it always was and always will be.
Side-Line: After more than three decades of making work that often questions systems, ideologies and the stories people use to organise reality, what still surprises you enough to make you want to create? Has the role of art for you become more about exposing structures, escaping them, or constructing temporary spaces where different ways of thinking are possible?
David Thrussell: The deeper I dig, the more I realise the less I know, the hungrier I get. For knowledge, for understanding, for truth. Just a glimpse. It is the best we can hope for, in a universe built and meant to be beyond our comprehension. As it should be.
About David Thrussell
David Thrussell is an Australian musician, composer and vocalist, active since 1988, whose work spans industrial, EBM, dark ambient, IDM and techno. He formed Snog in Melbourne in 1989 with Tim McGrath and Julia Bourke; Pieter Bourke joined soon after the band’s 1992 debut album “Lies Inc.”, the same year as the single “Corporate Slave”. Snog went on to release “Dear Valued Customer” (1994), “Buy Me… I’ll Change Your Life” (1997), “Third Mall from the Sun” (1999), “Beyond the Valley of the Proles” (2003), “Snog vs. The Faecal Juggernaut of Mass Culture” (2006), “The Last Days of Rome” (2007), “Last of the Great Romantics” (2010), “Babes in Consumerland” (2013), “Compliance” (2015), “Lullabies for the Lithium Age” (2020) and “Eight Offerings for the Undead” (2022), through labels including Machinery Records, Metropolis Records, Zoth Ommog, Shock Records, Hymen Records, Karmic Hit and Psy-Harmonics.
Thrussell launched Black Lung as a more experimental and techno-oriented outlet, debuting with “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” in 1994 and continuing through “The Disinformation Plague” (1996), “The Great Architect” (1999), “The Grand Chessboard” (2004), “The Coming Dark Age” (2005), “Full Spectrum Dominance” (2009) and “The Great Manipulator” (2019, Metropolis Records); the project has released almost exclusively through Germany’s Ant-Zen since 1999. Side-Line spoke with Black Lung about technology, governance and the future in June 2024, around the release of the ‘Armageddon’ video and the ‘Euthanasia’ video from the “Depopulate” single. In July 2026, Black Lung and Xavier Morel reworked “Babel” on Psy-Harmonics. Thrussell has also recorded as Soma with Pieter Bourke, releasing “The Inner Cinema” through Ant-Zen in January 2026.
His solo work includes the soundtrack for “The Hard Word” (2002), nominated for Best Original Soundtrack at the 2002 ARIA Music Awards, and the vinyl release “Eros Maximus” (2025). In 2026, Thrussell released the ritual LP “The Reign Of Dead Matter” through Ant-Zen, recorded live at midnight at the Melbourne Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and joined Darrin Verhagen of Shinjuku Thief for “The Call Of Cthulhu”, released through Metropolis Records.
The forthcoming Black Lung album “Ordo Ab Chao”, recorded live at Temple des 33 in Paris on June 21, 2026, as a commissioned Masonic soundscape, precedes Snog and Black Lung’s only confirmed European shows of 2026, at Fourscher Festival in Erfurt, Germany, on November 7 and 8.
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Based in Wrocław, I work as a music journalist and photographer covering electro, industrial, EBM, gothic, and darkwave. My work includes features and live coverage, as well as concert, portrait, promo, and theater photography. What interests me most is the connection between artistic intention, what the work communicates, and what unfolds live on stage, all in pursuit of the bigger picture behind the music.
