Dr Slaggleberry’s ‘Filth Infusion’ EP explodes into chaotic life with ‘Mind Needles’, blending dissonant chords and layered, fuzzy guitar-based melodies with a breakneck drumbeat. It makes things very clear right from the outset that this music is not intended to appeal to a mainstream audience. Just as one starts to become accustomed to the alien sounds battering one’s eardrums, ‘Mind Needles’ is over, as quickly as it began. It gives way to the dark, ominous, delayed clean intro of ‘Filth Infusion’, which rings with a kind of eerie power that betrays the first influence on Dr Slaggleberry that can actually be identified – it’s like Meshuggah, only with a little more of a gritty feel. When the song ‘drops’, layers of technical, lyrical guitar wash over, with melodies leaping out of the mix, disappearing and resurfacing again in a kind of bizarre, dissonant ‘dance’. It’s as if the clean precision associated with modern ‘djent’ has been replaced with a more chaotic, psychedelic ‘snarl’.

Dr Slaggleberry continue to buck metal trends throughout this EP. If you’re looking for catchy, formulaic, riff-driven, ‘breakdown’ metal, you’ve definitely come to the wrong place. However, don’t presume that because the band choose to avoid the breakdown cliché they lose the brutality of their music: the filthy, tumultuous riffs in ‘Rapids’, and the darkly terrifying ‘Red Machine’ are both perfectly moshable!

Through ‘Filth Infusion’ Dr Slaggleberry have created a progressive, explorative soundscape of noise which pushes the boundaries of metal to its very limits. As such, it’s a little like Marmite – you’ll either love it, or hate it. Either way, check it out – it’s great to see a band reminding us that so called ‘progressive’ metal extends beyond the often-formulaic wave of ‘djent’ that’s spreading through the scene at the moment.