Bandcamp Track fifteen on Last One is called “No, I Don’t (Suffer)” and it lasts one second. Track four is “Human Virus” at seven seconds. Track twelve, “A Picnic In The Park,” runs four. Track nineteen, “Killing Me Gently,” is back to one. Twenty-two tracks total, the longest barely past four minutes, the whole album over before the patience tests of most doom records have settled into their second movement. Last One is the latest dispatch from Igor Mortis, the Slovenian one-man army behind Slund, and the format is the joke the album makes about the format. You drop in, you get hit, you drop out. Repeat.
This is Mortis’s twenty-something Slund release since the project started in 2016. The body of work runs across grindcore, powerviolence, sludge, noise, and various split releases with bands you have never heard of unless you are already deep in the Slovenian extreme underground. The moves on Last One will not surprise anyone who has spent time with that catalogue. What it does is concentrate the entire range into a half-hour blast where every track makes its case in the time it takes you to read this sentence, and then ends.
What separates Slund from a hundred other one-man grindcore projects on Bandcamp is the willingness to let the format be the comedy. The track titles (“Power Hungry,” “WTF,” “Still Ignored By The Smooth Jazz Scene,” “Nostril Yoga,” “A Picnic In The Park”) read like they were written in one sitting after a particularly bad day, and the lengths confirm the suspicion. “Still Ignored By The Smooth Jazz Scene” is six seconds. The micro-tracks function as connective tissue between the actual songs, and they accumulate into a portrait of a grinder whose project has run long enough to start taking itself unseriously, which on a record this aggressive is a kind of confidence move.
The production sits where most one-man grindcore records sit: dense mid-range, scratching guitars, click-forward drums, harsh vocals on top of a wall of sound that prioritizes impact over breath. Mortis’s compositional move on the longer tracks (“Bore Me,” “Special Friends,” “Levitation”) is to actually let the songs run past two minutes, and those are where the Slund project shows its range. “Levitation” at almost three minutes pulls the sludge weight up against the powerviolence speed and lets the contrast develop. “Bore Me” runs four. “Special Friends” sits in the middle of the record at almost three minutes and reads as the album’s structural anchor.
For a Bandcamp solo project that has been running for nine years across this many releases, Last One is a confident statement of where Mortis’s Slund work currently sits: chaos as a project, format as a joke, the Slovenian extreme underground as a context the rest of us mostly do not get to hear. Worth your time if you can hear thirty minutes of grindcore-powerviolence-sludge-hardcore as the album’s actual argument rather than as a barrier. Listeners who came to grindcore through Discordance Axis or Pig Destroyer will recognize the lineage. Listeners who want their heavy music to commit to longer-form structures will find the format the obstacle, and the format is the point.
The mix is dense, mid-focused and pushed at modern loudness across the twenty-two tracks. Guitars carry heavy saturation with limited string definition in the densest passages, while bass functions primarily as low-mid support without claiming an articulate voice of its own. Drums sit forward with click-defined kick attack and short, snappy snares; cymbals push toward harshness in the densest sections. Harsh vocals sit on top of the wall as cutting screams, prioritizing impact and intelligibility over integration with the instrumentation. The shorter pieces (one to seven seconds) function as connective tissue rather than full statements; the longer tracks (“Levitation,” “Bore Me,” “Special Friends”) show the production’s actual range, with natural drum room treatment and some structural breathing space. Mastering loudness is consistent across the record; dynamic contrasts come from abrupt breaks and tempo shifts rather than internal level work.
Standout tracks: “Levitation” for the three-minute piece that pulls sludge weight against powerviolence speed. “Bore Me” for the four-minute track where Slund’s longer-form composition shows. “Special Friends” for the structural anchor that holds the middle of the record together.
Last One is the kind of solo grindcore project where the artist’s commitment to the form is the form. Twenty-two tracks, half of them under a minute, the joke being that an album this aggressive can also be self-aware about its aggressiveness. Worth your time if you live in the underground territory between grindcore and sludge and you can hear thirty minutes of variation on a single intensity as the project’s actual argument.
