There is nothing human left in Primitive Man except suffering itself. What once began as sonic devastation has evolved on Observance into a ritual of self-disintegration — an auditory dissection of what it means to be human in a time without direction or redemption.
The “primitive” in their name no longer refers to origin or simplicity, but to what remains after all civilization has decayed: the raw, bodily truth of existence. From the very first moments, Observance leaves nothing to the imagination. The riffs crawl like rust across steel, the bass pulses like a machine refusing to die, and the drums move with the rhythm of collapsing concrete.
The production is massive yet suffocating — every sound is so densely layered that it forces the listener to feel rather than listen.
Primitive Man remains faithful to their tradition of total destruction, but there is a new dimension here: control within chaos. It’s as if the band has learned not to tame the uncontrollable, but to completely surrender to it.
As the title suggests, Observance is not an album but a ritual act. What is being “observed” here is humanity itself — its own failure, its own decay.
Philosophically, this record is about presence within absence: the observation of meaning, even when meaning no longer exists.
It echoes Cioran’s nihilistic lucidity and Nietzsche’s Dionysian madness — that moment when one ceases to search and simply is within the void. Ethan McCarthy’s voice remains one of the most recognizable weapons in the extreme spectrum. Not through range or technique, but through sheer physical violence.
His voice is an elemental phenomenon — earth, fire, bile — destroying language before it can even acquire meaning. The lyrics, largely indecipherable, function not as message but as manifest of decay. Language here is not communicative but ritualistic — an incantation of nothingness.
What makes Primitive Man unique is their refusal to romanticize suffering. There is no melancholy, no hope, no comfort.
Their primitivism is not a return to nature, but the unmasking of man as nature itself — blind, destructive, cyclical.
In that sense, Observance stands as a monument to honesty: rejecting everything that defines modernity — speed, progress, control — and returning to a slower, heavier rhythm that feels like the dying breath of a planet.
With Observance, Primitive Man reaffirm their place as one of the most existentially honest acts in the extreme music spectrum.
Their sound transcends genre and intent — it is as much philosophy as it is noise.
Where others use chaos to shock, Primitive Man uses chaos to reveal truth.
Observance is not a record you play to escape. It is a record you endure, to be confronted — with death, with emptiness, with yourself.
87/100
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