On Maggot Mass, Margaret Chardiet – better known as Pharmakon—delivers her most visceral and harrowing work yet, solidifying her place as one of the most uncompromising figures in noise and industrial music. Returning from a hiatus of five years, Chardiet has always embraced the abrasive and the abject, from the shrill torment of Abandon (2013) to the grotesque physicality of Contact (2017). With Maggot Mass, she's dealing with disgust at the dysfunctional relationship between humans and the rest of life on earth. Confronting the eviscerating impact and inevitable process of decay with an intensity that feels almost suffocating.
Where previous releases often felt like external confrontations with oppressive forces – whether societal or metaphysical – Maggot Mass turns inward. The album is a dark meditation on mortality and the slow, grinding dissolution of the self. The opening track, "Wither and Warp," immediately sets the tone with layers of scraping, distorted soundscapes that crawl beneath Chardiet’s signature guttural growls and screams. Her voice, always a weapon, feels even more primal and gutted here, as though being swallowed by the sonic onslaught she constructs. The production is dense and layered, but unlike the shrieking chaos of 2014’s Bestial Burden, Maggot Mass favors a slower, more methodical disintegration of form. It’s an album that feels like a process—unfolding as bodies rot, as bones break, and as skin sloughs away the maggots of the title, transfiguring us all into fresh, possible new life and nutrients for the same.
Sonically, Pharmakon continues to manipulate the limits of industrial and noise music, but with Maggot Mass, there’s a notable shift in texture and pacing. "Methanol Doll" employs a deliberate pacing, with grinding metallic drones that evoke the slow churn of geological time. The song unfolds like a dirge. The rhythms are slow and agonizing, and the noise is less sharp than it is thick, like a weight bearing down on you. This pacing allows the listener to dwell in the decay, to feel the inevitability of entropy rather than be jolted by it.
Lyrically, Chardiet continues to plumb the depths of human frailty, but with Maggot Mass, she seems less interested in catharsis than in brutal acceptance. Themes of death, decomposition, and physical dissolution dominate the album, but there’s a grim reverence in her approach in the glee taken at rebirth coming from death. There's also a shape finger in the shape of "Buyers Remorse" pointed toward the wealthy, the gluttonous and ruinous among us juxtaposing crushing industrial beats with desperate screams. There’s a sense of being consumed – not just by death, but by forces far beyond the individual.
What distinguishes Maggot Mass from Pharmakon’s earlier albums is its focus on inevitability rather than confrontation. On previous records, there was often a sense of struggle – fighting back against bodily limits, a refusal to succumb. But here, that struggle has given way to a kind of horrific acceptance. There’s no victory, no escape. The album’s title says it all: this is a mass for maggots, a funeral for flesh.
In the end, this is an album that asks the listener to face the unavoidable with no hope of transcendence. It’s Pharmakon at her bleakest, but also her most focused. The sonic landscapes are meticulously constructed, and Chardiet’s ability to blend noise with existential weight is unparalleled in contemporary experimental music.
"Splendid Isolation" and the epic battering that is "Oiled Animals" are tracks that, though deeply unsettling, encapsulate Pharmakon’s singular ability to turn sound into a brutal reflection of our physical and existential decay. Maggot Mass isn’t easy listening, but it’s essential for anyone looking to confront the darker sides of existence, to find a way to reconcile grief and loss on both a personal and global scale and to face the ever-gaping chasm between the possibility of communion with the earth under the thumb of ruling systems.
