by Kurt Orzeck
“You know when you get a fucking block of tofu and you have to cut slits on the side of the plastic and drain the liquid out, so you’re left with a firm, dry chunk of the good stuff? That’s sort of what making this album was like.”
Heard on the other end of a video chat on a Monday afternoon in July, it’s an odd but actually quite nutritious metaphor that vegan vocalist/guitarist/bassist Mark Bronzino has concocted to describe the creation of East Coast, punk-peppered, death-metal band Kontusion’s debut album Insatiable Lust for Death.
In Bronzino’s mind, Insatiable Lust for Death (Profound Lore) congealed for months, if not years ago. But as he explains, with a huge Ozzy Osbourne poster hanging on a wall behind him, the record was still going through changes (yeeeah) until shortly before its release three days before we connected. While Bronzino had the vision for the record set in his mind years back, he and Kontusion’s other member, drummer Chris Moore, overhauled it so many times that the LP is as unrecognizable from its original form as Sharon Osbourne after her countless plastic surgeries.
“We spent so much time making it,” recounted Bronzino, who, along with Moore, also sewed synth segments into the labor of hate. “We spent two years writing, then self-released our self-titled demo in 2022 [which Sentient Ruin Laboratories reissued a year later], then decided we had to start writing our first [proper] album immediately. It went through so many demo processes, with me playing guitar, then us jamming together, then I'd make another demo at home on my computer, and then we’d jam more, and then we demoed the whole record again, just me and Chris, and then we were like, ‘OK, we can record it for real.’”
While in L.A. due to duties opening for grindcore band Nausea (not the NYC crust punk legends), Kontusion took advantage of the trip by swinging down to Townsend Mastering compound in Orange County, where legendary producer Nick Townsend (Iron Maiden, Dr. Dre) is based.
“He cut a lacquer [record] just of Side A, which made the record real to me,” Bronzino marveled. “And now it’s out there for everyone to hear.”
The faint of heart — not that many people of such temperament would buy a record called Insatiable Lust for Death by a band named Kontusion on a whim — will find that the album is a wee bit too real. Anchored by Bronzino’s guttural howls, which sound like they emanated out of Hell itself, and propelled with hardly a second’s pause by Moore’s relentless smashing of the drums, the LP would probably be declared a public safety hazard were it made by more than two dudes.
Beyond seemingly defying rules of physics, what makes Insatiable Lust for Death especially remarkable is that, despite the lurid description above, the 11 songs — which include the adoringly titled “Endless Horror,” “Countless Atrocities” and “Warsystem (The Shitlickers)” — are mind-bogglingly, mind-scramblingly catchy. Fans of Moore’s other band, Repulsion, and Bronzino’s previous projects Iron Reagan and Mammoth Grinder will gobble it up like wolves preying on a deer. But more innocent woodland creatures like squirrels and field mice might take a liking to it as well.
That magic ingredient of infectiousness could be due in part to, continuing the dead-animal analogy, Bronzino and Moore’s mutual affinity for Carcass. The uncompromisingly extreme British metal band unbelievably generated a popular single, “Heartwork,” in 1994, proving that — with a healthy dose of melody and sticking to a pop-adjacent song structure — death metal could actually have some crossover appeal.
It’d be a stretch to say that Kontusion will achieve that same anomalous status, as Insatiable Lust for Death is 26 minutes of punishment over which pedestrian music listeners would opt for a root canal of equal duration. It would be longer, though had the band not strained out all that unappetizing tofu juice.
On the subject of fluids, Bronzino shares an anecdote that paints a picture of Insatiable Lust for Death better than this writer could create. After Kontusion won legions of new fans with their appearances at Hell in the Harbor, Maryland Deathfest, RPM Fest, Rage of Armageddon Festival, and Northwest Terror fest in the States, they ventured to Europe to do the same. They succeeded, but Bronzino got the intestinal equivalent of a frat-house hazing before their last show on the trek, at Obscene Extreme in Czechia.
“We were sleeping at a hostel the night before the show, and I felt a weird rumbling in my stomach. So I went to the communal bathroom and started puking out this black-red shit,” he — to put it mildly — graphically recounted. “I felt a little better and thought it was maybe like a dog-has-to-eat-some-grass thing, so I brushed my teeth, because, you know, I don’t want vomit to fuck up my teeth, and I got back into bed and my bandmates were sleeping like little angels. But a little while later, I was like, ’Something doesn’t feel right,’ so I went back to the bathroom to splash some water on my face, and all of a sudden, dude, I started fucking throwing up! And then I was like, ‘Wait, I gotta shit too.’ I was gonna wake up Chris and ask him to bring me to the hospital, but I didn’t have the heart to wake him up, and being Italian-American, I was just like, ‘I gotta let this run its course.’”
Bronzino continued: “So the morning comes, and we go to the festival, and we’re walking uphill in a fucking heatwave, and I’m on no sleep and have nothing in my system, and I’m in my full stage clothes and wearing boots. We finally got to the backstage area, and I hit the bathroom as many fucking times as I could while trying to reserve whatever energy I had left. And then a booking agent noticed [my condition] and brought me to the medical tent, which I didn’t even know they had, and they put me on an IV and literally squeezed the bag as fast as they could, and took me off it, and I got onstage. I couldn't enjoy the set as much as I normally, but people thought I was just super locked in, when really I was trying to not shit my pants.”
Moral of the story: Be sure to cut slits in your tofu packaging and drain out all the unsavory liquids before you eat it.