Some albums feel like comebacks. "Chronic Transfusion" feels more like a telegraphed exorcism - a hard-wired séance carried out in feedback loops, sputtering drum machines, and the gnarled hiss of magnetic tape that’s aged better than anyone expected. After nearly 30 years of radio silence, COMICIDE - a name once more whispered than spoken - has returned not with nostalgia, but with intent.

Originally formed in the early '80s by Stephen Ah Burroughs and Eric Jurenovskis, COMICIDE was a brutal sketch of what would later coagulate into Head of David, a band often cited in the fossil record of industrial punk's grim evolution, particularly by fans of Godflesh, and the mythologized axis of Birmingham's infernal noise scene. But COMICIDE, even then, was something a little more unstable - less about genre definition than erosion: of order, structure, fidelity.

With "Chronic Transfusion", their delayed debut album (yes, debut, after all these years), Burroughs revives the wreckage and injects it with a dying star’s worth of voltage. This isn’t an archival release, and it doesn’t feel like a band cashing in on legacy points. It’s a new body stitched from old scars, and its pulse is absolutely erratic.

The six tracks here feel like debris in orbit, spinning in and out of gravitational pull. Opener "Transfusion" kicks things off with what might be the industrial equivalent of a fever dream - layers of electronic interference and bleak pulsations, not quite rhythm, not quite freefall. It’s less a track than a corridor. If there’s a theme here, it’s the threshold - between noise and form, memory and myth.

Elsewhere, “White Line” buzzes like a corrupted surveillance feed - part techno-fossil, part moral panic. Then “Fumes of Remorse” lurches forward like a grief-stricken android, laced with loops that sound like they've been extracted from the underside of some dead machine. There’s beauty here, but it’s the kind of beauty you might find in a flooded data center: shimmering, but probably toxic.

The centerpiece, “Defective Control”, earns its near-ten-minute runtime with a slow-burning climb toward something that could be mistaken for catharsis - if catharsis was a type of corrosion. Then "Wider Release" and "Chronic Transmission" stretch things toward something almost meditative, if your meditation involves malfunctioning hardware and suppressed rage.

There’s a twisted elegance to the lo-fi aesthetic - this isn’t laziness or affectation. It’s architecture through decay. The distortion, tape hiss, the refusal to clean up the mess: it's all part of the language. The album doesn’t just sound like it was recorded in a bunker under a collapsing brutalist tower - it belongs there.

Yet despite the brutality, there’s also restraint. This isn’t noise for noise’s sake; it’s narrative by omission, storytelling through tension. In a world that now routinely churns out “industrial” as just another genre tag for synths with high blood pressure, "Chronic Transfusion" comes as a reminder of what the genre once threatened to be: unsanitized, unsellable, and defiantly alive in its decomposition.

And for all its bleakness, it’s weirdly funny too. There's a deadpan humor buried under the rubble - perhaps in the very act of resurrection itself. After decades of silence, COMICIDE could’ve done anything. Instead, they made a record that sounds like it was transmitted through a malfunctioning IV drip in a haunted NHS basement. That takes guts. Or perhaps just a very specific kind of noise-borne enlightenment.

Zoharum deserves credit for believing in this music’s afterlife. "Chronic Transfusion" isn’t an easy listen - but that’s precisely the point. It’s a record that doesn't explain itself, but leaves you wondering whether the machines were trying to tell us something all along - we just didn’t know how to listen until the signal broke.