heavy-metal-darkness: Gridfailure | Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III

Thursday, November 13, 2025

Gridfailure | Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III | Nefarious Industries

Release Date: October 3^rd, 2025

Format: Digital, Cassette

Genre: Dark Ambient, Experimental, Dark Hardcore, Avant Jazz, Black Metal, Drone

Country: USA

Born from the New York underground, Gridfailure is the solo project of David Brenner, an artist known for his chaotic blend of post-industrial soundscapes, experimental noise, and pitch-black atmosphere. Since its inception in 2016, Gridfailure has operated as a shifting entity, pulling together collaborators from across the extreme music spectrum. Brenner’s project thrives on unpredictability and raw tension, merging elements from jazz, drone, ambient, and metal into something entirely alien. “Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III” marks the third installment in an ambitious five-part conceptual series chronicling humanity’s downfall, a grotesque and theatrical vision of a world devouring itself.

The concept here continues a saga of environmental collapse and moral decay. Brenner presents a brutal sonic depiction of the Anthropocene, painting scenes of cannibalistic societies, collapsing ecosystems, and self-inflicted ruin. The album’s subtitle, “Acquiring A Taste,” suggests a civilization not only dying but celebrating its destruction. It’s as bleak as it sounds, an eighty-minute descent through suffocating electronics, percussive chaos, and nightmarish textures.

Musically, the album shifts unpredictably, crossing through distorted soundscapes, ritualistic noise, and moments of eerie calm. There’s a cinematic sense of decay running through it, as if the entire world is collapsing in slow motion. Guest appearances from figures like Steve Austin of Today Is The Day, Leila Abdul-Rauf of Vastum, and Mac Gollehon (whose trumpet once graced sessions for David Bowie) add even more layers to the madness. Their presence doesn’t lighten the tone; it only deepens the sense of suffocation and unpredictability.

Brenner’s approach is uncompromising. He works with sounds gathered from years of field recordings, weather events, and countless improvised sessions, resulting in an album that’s both vast and claustrophobic. The production stays raw and unfiltered, perfectly suited to the theme of environmental and human disintegration. The use of multiple genres, industrial, black metal, ambient, and avant jazz, is less like fusion and more like collision, a sonic disaster unfolding in real time.

“Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III” isn’t meant for casual listening. It demands patience, even endurance. It’s a sound experiment that drags the listener through rust, static, and screams from an earth in its death throes. It’s chaotic and overwhelming, but that chaos has a strange magnetism. Beneath all the noise lies a kind of order, the grim logic of collapse.

For fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, The Body, and T.O.M.B., this album offers a journey into the extreme end of experimental music, ugly, fascinating, and thoroughly human in its depiction of destruction. An absorbing but punishing listen, “Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III” expands the boundaries of Gridfailure’s vision without losing its raw, corrosive edge. It’s not meant to entertain, but to unsettle, and in that, it succeeds completely.

Score: 6.0