Dermabrasion

Toronto death rockers Dermabrasion share their new single, “Magic Missile";  the third track from Pain Behaviour, the band’s debut full-length coming out on Hand Drawn Dracula Jan. 26. Following “Goblin Dance,” released late last year, the single offers another example of their collaboration with producer Josh Korody (Fucked Up, Nailbiter, Breeze, Beliefs, Vallens) on tracks from 2021 self-released demo Lunate.

Toronto director Shelby Wilson (The Straight Ball (2022), We Need To Talk About Diseases (2022)) produced and directed the video that features a cast in handmade masks at a foreboding garage sale. While the video takes loose inspiration from 2008 performance art piece The Price Master, the pathetic fallacy on the rainy, single-day production in May 2022 was simply fate.

Scrape the scum and grime off the floors of every bar and basement in so-called Toronto that dared host a mob of unruly hardcore kids or sweaty, undulating goths and you get Dermabrasion — in sound and spirit.

For just over a year, the duo have peddled their fleshy post-punk in and around their home town with a deceptively ferocious live show that has landed them supporting slots for the likes of Lydia Lunch Retrovirus, Special Interest, Pixel Grip, Nox Novacula and Front 242’s Patrick Codenys.

Dermabrasion’s 2021 demo EP Lunate marked a return to form for members Adam Bernhardt and Kat McGouran who started writing and performing together in 2015 with defunct Toronto punk band WLMRT. The five tracks on Lunate with a low-fi production that smacks of early Sisters of Mercy recordings offered only a haunting, shadowy outline of what the pair now bring forward with their full-length debut, Pain Behaviour.

Set to be released on Toronto-based Hand Drawn Dracula, Pain Behaviour chews up and spits out sonic motifs across 10 tracks that piece together a collection of influences reflecting the years both musicians have spent skulking around their city’s nightlife. The beer-flavoured ghouls smoking outside venues that no longer exist; the backed-up toilet smell hanging in the nightclub air together with fog, lasers and Siouxsie.

Produced by Josh Korody (Fucked Up, Nailbiter, Breeze, Beliefs, Vallens) and mastered by Noah Mintz, Pain Behaviour completes the baleful statement Dermabrasion first uttered with Lunate. Korody’s experience with electronic music helped hone the band’s sound to a menacing edge they call “death rock and roll,” swinging equally in the directions of first wave and contemporary post-punk, industrial, NWOBHM and meathead rock.

Brooding grooves like album opener “Halberdier” and “Goblin Dance” want to allure like a California darkwave fest poster while primitive progressions like those of “Proving Grounds” and “Sleepless” betray a willful lack of discipline for the sound to ever fully wrest its claim to punk. Hardcore riffs dressed for goth night at the sports bar.

A fascination with the corporeal form and the occult threads through the lyrical subject matter in what McGouran describes as a “mid-concept.” With allusions to Roman Catholicism, LaVeyan Satanism and genre fiction, the songs on Pain Behaviour investigate shame, power, duty and the responsibility of simply inhabiting a human body.

While needling, existential questions appear on several tracks, the full pastiche of the band’s ersatz dogma is best demonstrated in the wicked anthem heralding the album’s halfway point, “Magic Missile.” Over a thunderous kick drum and snare hits that crack like a whip, the query curls like smoke: When the gods falter, what size are the faults?