Maladie Week, Day 2—Wounds, Scars and Why Everything Goes
Okay. Let’s get this out of the way.
If you do a five-day deep dive like this, rankings are inevitable. You don’t mean to do it. But your brain does it anyway. And yeah—if I had to line them up, Symptoms II would land at the bottom of my list.
Not because it’s bad. Not even close. But because one of them has to be last, and this is just how it shook out.
Björn and I both have a clear favourite—same one, no debate. But the rest? Total chaos. Completely different orders. And honestly? I love that. It makes the whole project more fun. More personal.
So no shame for II.
It still slaps. Just not as hard.
Let’s go.
Drowning in Lethal Wounds
Vulnus opens like a wound. And not the clean kind. We get cello. Slow, mournful guitar. The whole thing is heavy with mood—doom-laden and dark, but not suffocating. Just—full of weight.
It builds slowly. Patiently. The cello bows out and hands the melody to a second guitar, and then to the saxophone. Same melody, different textures. It’s hypnotic. I kept looping the first three minutes without even noticing. Not bored—just fully caught. It could work as a standalone intro track, honestly. But it keeps going. Drums slip in. The track swells. Urgency creeps up in layers.
Distortion kicks in around the four-minute mark, just a touch of static, and then finally, vocals. Growled. Earth-deep.
And behind them—melody. Still. Saxophone shadowing the pain. Spoken word, both in English and French:
"Phoenix dies the last time.
No more ashes and rebirths left.
This wound can not be healed.
I am the end and the end is me."
And then the mood shifts.
Same melody—but now we get blast beats, sharper screams, rasps. The whole track turns inside out. Same bones. Different beast.
"Make it stop."
Bleeding Scars, but Softly
Abicere is an interlude.
No vocals, no screams. Just piano and synth.
It doesn’t try to impress you. It just sits with you for four and a half minutes and lets the melancholy linger. Think of it as a breath between collapse and reconstruction. It’s quiet. Still. Beautiful.
The Return of Nothingness
Discidium doesn’t erupt. It unfolds.
Slow doom riffs, deliberate drum hits, and a voice that splits in two.
From the first second, you get both vocalists: Déhà’s clean melodies gliding above Alexander’s feral rasp.
Same lines. Same rhythm. Two completely different textures.
It’s like watching light and shadow trace the same path at once.
The pace stays slow. Heavy. Weighted. But the track keeps shifting—the clean vocals bow out.
Alexander snarls on alone, and Déhà moves deeper—growls rising from below, later twisting into screams, pushed up against those slow, dragging guitars. The saxophone slips beneath the screams. Whispered narration emerges from thick bass.
Everything is here. And nothing feels forced.
One element hands over to the next like they’d rehearsed the choreography in secret.
It’s another example of what Maladie do so well—they don’t try to be anything. They just are.
They’re not doing extreme metal. They’re doing extreme music.
Not because it’s loud. Or heavy. Or harsh.
But because it dares to stretch. To meander. To take you somewhere unexpected and not apologise for the detour.
The song moves like a story. A narration that unfolds, one breath at a time. And with the blink of an eye, the atmosphere shifts completely.
That said: this one’s a lot. It’s fifteen minutes long and it changes tack more than once. I’ll be honest—it took me a couple of spins to fully drop into it.
But when it clicks? Oh, it clicks.
Like that section around the 11-minute mark.
Suddenly the bass starts slapping, and out of nowhere we get something like an oriental rhythm—accompanied by whisper-rasped narration.
And then, in the last two minutes? Rapped vocals. Because of course.
Because why the fuck not. Everything goes.
Same Year. Different Sound.
We close with a quiet one.
40 – Rev.1979 brings back a familiar number: 1979, Björn’s birth year.
The original track showed up on Maladie’s first album …Plague Within… (2012). Here, it returns—re-recorded with piano and saxophone, and a very different tone.
We get female vocals harmonising over piano and soft bass lines. The piano carries everything. Later we get some jittery post-rock guitars. The whole thing leans more into The Gathering than anything else on this record. It's strangely out of time. Different from the rest—but it works.
Not my favourite. Still better than most.
Symptoms II is the doomy one. The gloomy one. The one that drags its heels through the dirt and takes its sweet time doing it. Slow, heavy, deliberate. Less chaos, more shadow. It doesn’t come in to destroy—it lingers. Brooding. Uneasy.
So no, it’s not my personal favourite. But even when Maladie turn the lights down low, they still know exactly how to get under your skin.
Maladie Week continues tomorrow. Symptoms III.
The one we don’t talk about lightly.
The one that still leaves a mark.