London experimental electronic trio Decommissioned Forests release third album ‘Chemistry’ – Out now
London experimental electronic trio Decommissioned Forests release third album 'Chemistry' - Out now
Released today, 3 November 2023, is the new album “Chemistry” from Decommissioned Forests. The album is available now from Bandcamp, Spotify, and all major streaming platforms. This is the third full-length album for the London-based experimental electronic trio and follows their dank atmospheric debut, “Forestry” (2019), and the post-industrial modernist sophomore album, “Industry” (2022).
Musically the trio (Howard Gardner, Daniel Vincent, and Max Rael) have been taking a broad range of influences by outsider artists such as Coil, Current 93, Cluster, Nine Inch Nails, Nurse With Wound and Throbbing Gristle to merge it into their own sound.
As the “Chemistry” album’s 10 tracks took shape, it became clear that the collection of songs had started to take a conceptual form. Daniel explains: “We started to plot the curve of the album musically as we recorded Max’s vocals, so the album loosely follows a day in the life, as day dreams, existential angst, and some kind of trauma surface.”
Max expands: “In terms of lyrical themes for the album, we start with Goodbye to the Cloud People which for me, is at least in part, about coming off antidepressants, leaving a world where nothing feels quite real, a not unpleasant dreamlike numbness, so the narrator of the album is taking a look at the world around him and in many ways, seeing it for the first time. Medication then plays into the wider them of chemistry which is explored further in the title track, and All is Vanity. Eel Tank and Bread to the Ducks describe alien attempts to capture something of the human condition, but there’s always something inherently lost in translation. Eel Tank reflects the existential horror of being trapped in unfulfilling meaningless work, whereas Bread to the Ducks tries to capture something of scarcity economics, capitalism and the factory farming of animals. I’m the kind of person who has a drawer full of old notepads going back over the years so I tend to bring a mixture of fresh new ideas and improvisation, as well as old words and ideas that I still like and that still resonate with me now. Lyrically, Black River Falls is pretty untouched from 2002, and The Dust is a rewritten version of a song that goes right back to the very first band I was in as a teenager at school. I guess some of us never really fully grow out of that teenage angst. ‘We were always easy prey’. We were then, as we are now.”
The Howard Gardner video for the album’s lead-single ‘Black River Falls’, which premiered on Side-Line.com in September, continues the narrative from “A Comforting Uncertainty” video from the band’s previous album.
You can download the album below from Bandcamp or order a physical copy.
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