Most psychedelic bands worthy of attention have a certain mystery attached to their music, substantiated by the inverted nature of their sound, or the altered state they aim to conger through it. It's usually just an aesthetic though, or they otherwise make the entire map of the terrain they'll be exploring with your apparent through the lyrics and other cues. Few feel as esoteric as The Drin. Your first clue at this should be their cover art, which tends towards the monochromatic, chewed-up xerox layouts popular amongst the more enigmatic circles within post-punk and hardcore. A format that they deviated from slightly with their 2022 release Down River In the Distance, where a shot of a band member in the woods appears like a negative from an ill-fated expedition to hunt down the Flatwoods Monster. Their most recent effort, Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom, takes on yet another deviant form while retaining the same dark aura, emerging as if through the b-grade, '80s cinema trope where a child's innocuous artwork reveals some dark secret of the seemingly gentle Mid-Western town they inhabit. Crawling down the attic stairs on all fours to the sounds of charismatic hymns and the buzzing of flies, the opening track "Venom" slithers between the shadows cast by the muntins of a window cracked pane, winding amongst the moldings and along the base of sagging drywall, until it can skirt up your pant leg like a rat up a drain pipe. Up through the cracks in the floorboards, rattles the rhythmic creak of "Five and Dime Conjurers," its course progressions slicing through and wounding the warm quietude of the track's humble ambiance, poisoning it and giving it a sickly sweet fragrance, like bile mixed with lavender water. "Peaceful, Easy, Feeling" is a clattering, claustrophobic sputter that will toss you around as if you've been blindfolded and stuffed in the trunk of a car, permitting you to sense the grinding din of an unpaved road beneath you, while jostling unceremoniously on the alter of a spare tire, shaken by the jounce of the wheels striking rocks and potholes in its path, while the barely audible dialogue of your captures filters back through the hallow frame of your steal cell, echoing like a credo of doom. Provided you make it to the second half of the album with your sanity in check, "Walk So Far" will draw you out of hiding and into the open, gripped by the howl of a baneful wind and the shrieks of small devilish birds, your gaze fixed at the center of sun, whose golden shade has turned a watery red, like the center of an iris when saturated with light from an otoscope- a peaceful horror whose hypnotic, slavish thrash resolves into the skeletal bellydance of "Go Your Way Alone," where flesh peels like the blooming of a rose, and the ashy melodicism of "The Day (Azoic)," with its brushing grooves and the slow reap of its chord progressions, a song that will suspend you in an astral plane above the blackened heap of a long extinguished funeral pyre, where all your earthly remain charred and splintered. The Drin are brewing an uncommon alloy of proprietary mischief on Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom. You can't always tell what's in it, but you can sense it, carving through some knot in your brain that the world at large would prefer to stay tied.
