Dendritic Arbor: I Love Romantic Love

So I was listening to this week’s “Shit That Comes Out Today” Spotify Playlist by our bitch slave indentured servant intern David Lee Rothmund (the sampler-style format of which makes it so easy to peruse the latest releases and see if there’s anything you dig!) when one new song caught my attention in a big, big way: “Blooming Amygdala,” from Romantic Love, the debut full-length by Pennsylvania’s Dendritic Arbor.

Then I spent the rest of my evening listening to the album on repeat.

Dave praised Romantic Love for its “total cacophony of… grind, black metal, and fuzz-blasting ambient drone/whatever-core,” echoing Grim Kim’s sentiments that Dendritic Arbor play “Sick, twisted noisy black/grind.” The fact that people are having such a hard time placing Dendritic Arbor into one category is simple: their music is fucking weird — gloriously so! — and very scary.

Although it doesn’t sound much like last month’s Total Vacuum by Antiversum, Romantic Love is similarly interested in pushing the envelope — I mean really pushing that motherfucker — and challenging our concepts of what genre… fuck… of what music can be. Because Romantic Love doesn’t sound like black/grind/fuzz/drone core — that would suggest they were genre benders. Romantic Love is a genre annhilator: it sounds like a black metal band, a grindcore band, a fuzz band, and drone band are all playing over one another. The band’s genius is that they make it work.

Stream Dendritic Arbor’s Romantic Love below. It’s out now on Grimoire. You can also buy it here for just seven bucks.