Pharmakon has returned with news of her fifth studio album, and her first since 2019's Devour — Maggot Mass is arriving October 4 via Sacred Bones Records, and it's being previewed with new single "WITHER AND WARP."
The nearly nine-minute track is a sludgy, walloping dirge, inspired by "a vivid dream about ego death." "As rotting matter / I will make / A good mother / Wet nurse to carrion feeders / Suckling from my wither and warp," Margaret Chardiet snarls.
In a statement about the song, Chardiet wrote:
The lyrics for this song began with a euphoric and vividly hallucinatory dream. In it, "I" did not exist, simply was. Without memory, identity, or ego. Suspended outside of time — only present moment. Oblivion. Without true thought, merely sensations that felt as comforting as they were unfamiliar: I sensed the prickled growing pains of an extending root, and the tingle of minerals soaking through it. I heard a chattering flow of information pass through me, all chemical communication. A vague awareness collected slowly, of being the moss that cushioned a stone. Enraptured in the beauty of existence as a plant, a producer who takes only sun, air, and water to reciprocate multitudes in return.
In this dream, my "self" was dead. I had passed away into the earth, becoming part of it, or many parts of it — through the divine transfiguration of decay. And I was more content in this mode of being than I ever was with life as a human. This dream-logic hinged upon the hope that when we die, the body merely breaks down back into the energy that was trapped inside its' matter. And all the carrion-eaters who might devour "you" will surely take "you" into "them," rendering your death back into the folds of life. This song represents the ecstasy of that dream… joy in (a lack of) existence, the self scattered throughout many forms of being.
How sweet the vision of a death without waste. But as always, we must awaken from such sweet dreams…
Check out "WITHER AND WARP" and see the Maggot Mass tracklist below.
Maggot Mass:
1. WITHER AND WARP
2. METHANAL DOLL
3. BUYER'S REMORSE
4. SPLENDID ISOLATION
5. OILED ANIMALS