In 2006, a cadre of crusties, metalheads, and other misfits started raising hell in a shabby brick house in the D.C. suburbs. The Corpse Fortress, as they called this Silver Spring, Maryland, arts space, went on to supply the DMV underbelly with a thriving heavy-music hub and party spot for over five years, until county officials forced its close in fall 2011. Dispatches from the Corpse Fortress’ last stand that September 24 set an anarchic scene: sketchy kids passing around laced joints and throwing bottles, teenagers fucking in the bushes with abandon, and down in the dungeon-like basement, the Maryland sludge-doom band Ilsa bringing the devil-worshippers to their knees.
Ten years and four albums in, Ilsa’s sphere of influence extends well outside their capital region stomping grounds, thanks to a slew of split releases with ascendent metal bands from across the globe (Finland’s Hooded Menace, SoCal’s Seven Sisters of Sleep, and Japan’s Coffins), as well as their signing with metal bastion Relapse Records in 2015. Irate neighbors and civil servants might have been able to shutter the Corpse Fortress’ physical location, but just like a crust-punk zombie uprising, its spirit will never be quashed so long as Ilsa are on the hunt. Their fifth album and full-length Relapse debut, named for the bygone venue, makes for a downright lethal listen, even by their genre’s crushing standards.
For all their primordial madness, Ilsa have always favored cold, mechanical discipline. Frontman Orion Peter recently declared to Noisey that “If metal is a machine, then we are that blood-encrusted, hair-matted machinery after it’s ground up every worker in the factory, sputtering and rumbling on.” He’s not exaggerating: to experience Ilsa’s latest is to hole up in said deathtrap for 48 minutes on end, throwing up the horns even as the gears grind your bones to dust. “Nasty, Brutish” fashions driving rhythms and chugging riffs into the sonic equivalent of a rusted chainsaw, effortlessly soldering grimy hardcore to factory-grade steel, while “Prosector” mines black metal’s coffers for weeping riffs and double-bass percussion.
Contemporary sludge-spewers frequently approach their arrangements from a binary standpoint: Black Sabbath’s heavy-lidded wars of attrition on one end, Eyehategod’s deep, quick clobberings on the other, with no room for a band that draws on both. Here, that false dichotomy falls to the wayside. Whereas Corpse Fortress’ funeral marches (“Hikikomori,” “Drums of the Dark Gods,” “Long Lost Friend”) position Ilsa closer to the former camp, the Integrity-esque rippers rounding out its first half (“Nasty, Brutish,” “Old Maid”) stir up the punkish fugue associated with the latter. This dual strategy, with both sounds juxtaposed throughout the track sequence, provides a much-needed dynamic escape hatch for the times when Corpse Fortress’ agonizing churn devolves into a mucky slog, like on lesser-spirited siblings “Cosmos Antimonos” and “Long Lost Friend.” By giving their bubbling cauldron a furious stir now and then, the group render its potion more potent.
Ilsa are the filthiest of modern doom’s foul misanthropes—they named themselves after a Nazi-themed sexploitation film, for Satan’s sake. Beyond the surface, though, they’re much more interested in building bridges and fostering community than torching everything to the ground. As a partially-queer, multi-racial, and ardently anti-fascist band signed to one of the biggest metal labels, the posse has already made significant strides in that direction. Between the feats of genre-juggling and the all-consuming roar, Corpse Fortress has a similarly inclusive effect. This album is well more than the sum of its mangled parts. Just don’t expect to make it out alive.
