I was unfamiliar with this band, as well as the bands which spawned this. Shock Frontier is the work of Robert Kozletski from Psychomanteum and Kyle Carney from Defiantly Fading. But I am very familiar with Malignant Records, so I had some inkling of what I was getting into. The label describes this album as 'an expertly composed and finely honed collection of shape shifting, nightmarish emissions and radioactive tonalities, drawing inspiration from some of the early death industrial pioneers, but adding an unique, densely layered and atmospheric style. This is a soundtrack to a world that ends not in a cataclysmic, fiery fashion, but one that slowly decays and rots into oblivion, where swathes of ghostly textures, samples, and disembodied noises morph into murky ambient realms, and caustic frequency reverberations pierce through a bleak, post-apocalyptic haze.' Sounds like a good time. We open with 'Paroxysm,' which includes some spoken word with statements like 'it's their fault that I tortured them.' This monologue melds well with the suffocating atmosphere and slow, plodding beat. This sets the tone for the rest of the album, which then moves into a noisy, ominous, mechanistic industrial nightmare with 'Angels Upon Iron Horses.' Other standout tracks include 'Understand the Extent of Our Disintegration' which layers sparse atmosphere with samples of reports from the 9/11 terrorist attacks and 'This Is Paradise,' which showcases the harsh side of things with grinding noise, but even this has a hypnotic quality that is almost peaceful. Throughout the album Shock Frontier maintains a tension between atmosphere and noise, which keeps things consistently interesting. This is an incredibly intense, well constructed album. I get the feeling that we are going to see a lot of this project. If you like your music rusted and charred with a side of death atmosphere, this was written just for you. This album weighs in at around 72 minutes.