If you were prowling the city’s heavy-music underground in the 2010s, odds are good that some of your current tinnitus was caused by Ad Nauseum. They were one of the most stentorian young sludge bands in Orlando playing some of most deafening shows around. This decade, however, they’ve been so silent as to be widely considered defunct. That’s why their recent surprise drop on Bandcamp — their first in nearly eight years — is a legit bombshell.
Before everyone gets carried away, though, Ad Nauseum is not back, exactly. While the two-track 2017 is a brand-new release, the songs are actually from the year in the name. These are pivotal tracks that capture the band’s latest sound, a phase that came about after some key internal revamping of duties and inspirations. This material was the most updated document of Ad Nauseum to ever exist. And then it was lost.
But in a bolt of freak luck, the recordings turned up years later right under their noses. “This might sound like something from Spinal Tap, but while cleaning out my inbox recently, I simply came across the tracks,” says guitarist-vocalist Glenn R. “They had been there all along but buried in nearly seven years of emails. So I said ‘fuck it’ once I confirmed these were in fact the tracks that sounded as good as I remembered, and I quickly threw together an album cover and uploaded it all to Bandcamp last night [Sept. 24] without a second thought.”
Compared to the fog of noise that shrouded Ad Nauseum’s previous recordings, 2017 features a streamlined brutality. “We stopped incorporating the harsh noise/synth stuff because it became really trendy to just go up on stage with a delay pedal, turn a bunch of knobs and call it ‘harsh noise,'” says guitarist Mike Saffran. “We adopted a more traditional guitar tone instead of using pitch shifters to make everything an octave lower. We started tuning just a whole step down and everything sounded much clearer and heavier because you could hear everything.”
For all its evolution, however, 2017 is an Ad Nauseum record through and through. More an extension than a departure, these two crushing tracks still smother like a mudslide. As Ad Nauseum songs have always done, these merge metal, hardcore and screamo into a singular, overwhelming colossus that transcends them all.
While this newly recovered material doesn’t mean that Ad Nauseum will suddenly rise again, the members note that they never actually disbanded.
“While the band’s official status seems ambiguous, we have simply become far more selective with the shows we play, perhaps painfully so,” Glenn R. says. But keeping hope alive, he states, “When the ‘right’ show comes along, we will undoubtedly play it.” In the meantime, 2017 is an important, and now thankfully unearthed, chapter in the arc of one of the heaviest Orlando bands in modern history. The two-song release is only on Bandcamp as a name-your-price download.
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This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2024.