Stridore – Stridore (Album Review)

Stridore’s self-titled album isn’t here to please you. It’s not interested in being background music, nor is it concerned with hooks, melodies, or cohesion in any conventional sense. What Johny Prunell has created here is not an “album” in the traditional form, but instead, it’s a psychological terrain made of fraying circuits, distant screams, and ominous calm. The result is as mesmerising as it is discomforting.

Prunell, known previously for his work in the ‘90s punk band Sección Makabra and a more structured solo return in 2023, now operates in a sonic space devoid of structure. Influenced heavily by his exposure to Merzbow and Japan’s harsh noise scene, Stridore is a project that dismantles expectations and dares the listener to engage with texture over tone, emotion over composition.

The opening track, 21V11, is the gateway drug. It begins with static, which would become a theme in this album, but soon veers into something weirder: faint choral harmonies weaving beneath the noise, evoking the surreal feel of an alien transmission. The song isn’t trying to soothe, it’s luring.

From there, Acromático takes the unsettling atmosphere further. The static becomes the music itself, a deliberate inversion of form. Halfway through, a beat sneaks in, more like a distant thump than a rhythm, grounding the piece before it’s washed away again. This track feels like you’re standing on the edge of something catastrophic, a haunted beach at night, wind howling, something vast and unknowable just out of sight.

With Carmilla, Prunell taps into something even more apocalyptic. It simulates the sensation of falling, of being midair in a crashing plane. Fleeting melodies offer brief reprieves, but the dominant mood is one of build-up with no catharsis. There’s hope here, but it’s smothered.

Canción Absurda arrives like a hallucinated memory. Calmer static, almost warm in comparison, fades into faint, nearly imperceptible vocals. The entrance of a lone guitar, simple and hesitant, temporarily shifts the album’s energy. It’s not a grand climax, but it feels earned. For a moment, there’s emotional clarity, only to slip back into the fog.

El Karma no funciona brings the dread back in force. The imagery, to me, is claustrophobic, an abandoned building, rain, fear of being followed. When the expected scare arrives halfway through, blaring static and an alarm-like shriek, it lands hard. The piece does more than unsettle; it manipulates tension like a horror film with no visual.

By the time we reach En Directo en Casa, the noise becomes overwhelming. The track builds like a disaster in slow motion, with frequencies shifting, tones piercing, and alarm sounds blaring. It’s the longest track on the album and easily one of the most suffocating. And yet, towards the end, the static softens slightly, like distorted rain falling after the storm.

IA Error 500 is aptly titled. It evokes the chaos of corrupted code, a sonic rendering of a glitching system. Dual layers of static pull and tear at each other, making you feel like you’re trapped inside a broken machine. It’s one of the more conceptually clear tracks, and all the more disturbing for it.

Irma Vep HNW is pure endurance. It remains consistent, no shifts, no surprises. Just unrelenting, distorted noises. It feels like being trapped, not in a building this time, but in a state of mind.

Things begin to flicker with life again in La chica de los girasoles en los ojos. The sound here is disorienting, moving from ear to ear, whispering, alive. The static here doesn’t just exist; it acts. This track feels invasive, like something crawling inside your thoughts.

The Dark Wizard of Oz breaks format briefly. There’s rhythm, subtle but real. There’s a sci-fi tint here, as if a retro-futurist machine suddenly spun up and began speaking. It’s the calm before the end, and a welcome breather.

Tokyo lo-fi reintroduces the human, distant voices, and conversations swallowed by static. It feels like a memory being corrupted in real time. You can almost hear life happening behind the noise, which makes its erasure all the more chilling.

Closing track Santidad offers no resolution. It leaves you with nothing but a wall of consistent static. No comfort. No final message. Just signal, everlasting, unchanging, uninterested in closure.

SCORE/Mediocre – Stridore is not an easy album. It’s not pleasurable in the usual sense. But it’s committed. It’s immersive. And it achieves what many experimental records fail to do, it makes you feel. Unease, dread, suspicion, fleeting hope. Prunell has crafted a brutal, disorienting meditation on raw sound. Whether it’s good or not depends entirely on what you expect from music. But if what you seek is to be challenged, to be disturbed, to be confronted, Stridore delivers.

[We rank singles, EPs, and albums on a scale of Poor, Mediocre, Good, Excellent, and Outstanding]

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