Two people: Robert Stelzer on drums, Michael Schmuck on bass and vocals. No guitar. Nine tracks. The album is called The Bold Idea of Being Satisfied, and by the end of it the irony is completely earned, this is music made by people who are clearly not satisfied, and the lack of satisfaction sounds enormous.
Thosar have been operating out of Graz, Austria since around 2019, slowly developing a sludge/doom approach built on Schmuck’s bass handling everything a guitarist would normally do, tone, melody, riff structure, all of it, while Stelzer’s drums treat every beat as a load-bearing element rather than a backdrop. “Fuck War” opens the record and announces the band’s sensibility in exactly three minutes: direct, heavy, not interested in explaining itself. “Sediment of Hate” is the album’s most unsettled track, the bass locked into a riff that sounds like something accumulating rather than simply repeating. “Dwell in Haze” is the closest the record comes to breathing, and even then the breath is labored. “Void” closes everything with the album’s heaviest stretch, nine minutes into the record and the last thing you hear is the sound of something collapsing.
The track listing tells you everything about the band’s worldview before you’ve heard anything: “Fuck War”, “Slowly Burying Myself”, “Sediment of Hate”, “Void.” This is not a band interested in subtlety, and they don’t need to be, the directness is part of the point. Sludge metal has always worked best when it means what it says, and Thosar consistently mean it.
The bass-only approach (no guitar) means the low-end is the whole story, the tone is thick and saturated, sitting where a guitar would be but with twice the physical presence. Schmuck runs his bass through enough gain to blur the lines between the instrument and the sonic environment it creates. Stelzer’s drumming is the counter-argument to any idea that this is just two people making do without a guitarist: his playing is too deliberate, too locked to the bass’s rhythmic choices, to be anything other than a complete compositional partner. The record sounds like it was recorded in a room the band has sweated in for years, which it probably was.
Standout tracks: Sediment of Hate, Dwell in Haze, Void
For a two-piece operating in a genre that usually needs three or four people just to generate the necessary mass, Thosar make an impressive amount of noise, and mean every second of it.
