Pentagram from Santiago in Chile (not to be confused with the American doom group – Pentgram – that formed fourteen years prior) consists of frontman Anton Reisenegger and the Juan Trifecta (Juan Pablo Uribe on guitar, Juan Pablo Donoso on drums, and Juan Francisco Cueto on bass). Earlier this year, they dropped their new album, Eternal Life of Madness, the follow-up to the debut The Malefice from over a decade ago.
“Icons of Decay” represents one of the most intense tracks off the record, and is as heavy as early Mastodon, Venom, or blackened thrash pioneers Skeletonwitch. Yet, Anton comments about the track stating, “the lyrics deal with the dangers of gender ideology, of which I myself am very critical. I think under the guise of compassion and understanding, many children are being deliberately misled and confused. Of course it’s all dressed in a very medieval, apocalyptic language, so it might give the impression I’m some kind of religious zealot, which of course I’m not. It’s just my way of putting current conflicts into an obscure poetic language.”
It’s a shame; lyrics like “rainbow of greys, destroy duality, secret masterplan, ultimate frontier” or “preying on the innocent, abyss of immorality, evil conspiracy, grotesque travesty” are reactionary and outdated. Posing normalcy of gender as a spectrum is somehow a secret masterplan or a evil conspiracy is not esoteric, it’s simply edgy in the most shallow way.