Five years is a long gap between records. The Berlin trio, Arne Heesch on guitar and vocals, Yvonne Ducksworth on bass and vocals, Andy Schünemann on drums, last released Under The Manchineel in 2018, and spent much of the intervening time building New World Hoarder in their cellar practice room, recording it there through August 2021 before it finally arrived on Exile On Mainstream in March 2023. The circumstances left their mark. This is an album that sounds like it was assembled in close quarters, with patience, with intent, and with very little interest in making anything easier for the listener.
“Nutcrème Superspreader” opens with a title that leans into dark absurdity before delivering something considerably heavier. At just under five minutes it’s the shortest track on the record, and it functions as a threshold, tightly wound, the dual vocals of Heesch and Ducksworth circling the same phrase before the riff settles in and refuses to move. It tells you what kind of record this is going to be. Then “Omega Time Bomb” takes over at ten minutes and makes the case fully. The song has the patience of something enormous and unhurried. It doesn’t arrive at its centre until well past the halfway mark, spending its opening portion establishing a single churning progression that slowly fills all available space. When it finally breaks open, the dynamic shift hits with a weight that the long setup has entirely earned.
The title track holds the middle of the album. “New World Hoarder” is six minutes of concentrated pressure, less sprawling than “Omega Time Bomb,” more focused, the riff cycling with a bleak insistence that the vocal hooks do nothing to soften. It reads as the record’s thesis in song form, and one of the most direct things Treedeon have committed to tape. “Viking Meditation Song” follows and earns its slightly deadpan title: there’s something almost ritual about its structure, a mid-tempo crawl that doesn’t so much build as accumulate, adding density in increments until the weight becomes nearly physical.
“RHV1” operates with a coiled energy unlike anything else here, it moves with more angular momentum than the surrounding tracks, a cold and clinical quality to the riff that suggests something industrial without fully committing to it. The contrast makes it feel necessary rather than out of place. And then “Läderlappen” closes everything at twelve and a half minutes. The German word translates loosely to “leather cloth”, mundane and material, and the song carries something of that quality: no grand gestures, just sustained application of pressure over an extended duration until the sheer accumulation of it becomes its own form of impact. It is the record’s most patient and most rewarding track, and the right way to end an album built on the idea that heaviness is something earned through time rather than volume alone.
The album was self-recorded in the band’s cellar practice room through August 2021, mastered in 2022, and it sounds like exactly that, in the best possible sense. The production has a rawness and proximity that suits the material: guitars with a thick mid-range presence, Ducksworth’s bass sitting forward in the mix and sharing lead space with Heesch’s guitar in a way that flattens any conventional hierarchy. The dual vocals are a constant presence throughout, sometimes moving in unison, sometimes pulling apart, and the interplay carries the emotional charge that the riffs provide structurally.
Standout tracks: Omega Time Bomb, New World Hoarder, Läderlappen
