Prurient

Dominick Fernow keeps fortifying his reputation as one of the county’s premier purveyors of darkness: The owner of New York’s extreme-sound bunker, Hospital Productions, as well as the esteemed label that shares that name, Fernow has also been recording as Prurient for about a decade. His releases for his own label, Load Records, Hanson, Bloodlust!, Troubleman and many other imprints have established him as one of the world’s foremost and most focused noise acts. A lover of treble and troubled poetry that’s bent beneath circuits and cycles of sound, Fernow has pushed Prurient into consistently daring territory by incorporating elements of electronica, metal and sound art inside his challenging discography.

Bermuda Strain, Fernow’s debut LP for metal giant Hydra Head as Prurient, as a perfect merging of all of this. Built around fragments of romantic dejection and aggression, Bermuda Strain takes a turn for the electronic, with songs like “There Are Still Secrets” and “Let’s Make a Slave” pushing squarely into dance territory. But the harshness is still there, both lyrically and sonically, especially on “Myth of Sex.” Pretty keyboards sigh from inside splintering static walls, eventually disappearing to reveal a stark, sinister melody. His voice caked in effects, Fernow whispers his thoughts, like the menacing flicker at the end of a pitch-black hallway.

Fernow also plays in black metal band Ashpool and in Cold Cave, who headline Prurient’s bill at Hopscotch. In both of those bands, though, Fernow makes concessions to the genres within which he’s working—that is, Cold Cave’s pop music requires something different than Ashpool’s ferocity. In Prurient, though, we get to witness the intense synthesis of all of these approaches from one of America’s most urgent, vital artists. —Grayson Currin