AGENBITE MISERY Announce New Single “Cascara Sagrada”

Extreme-metal visionaries AGENBITE MISERY return with their newest single, “Cascara Sagrada,” a ferocious and intricately constructed piece that showcases the band’s most adventurous writing to date. The track serves as the latest preview of their debut full-length Remorse of Conscience, a concept album that adapts every chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses into a standalone sonic experience.

Originally the final composition written for the record, “Cascara Sagrada” stands apart with its non-traditional structure, technical ambition, and uniquely dissonant atmosphere. Drawing heavily from avant-extreme acts like Pyrrhon and Convulsing, the single embodies the unsettling tension and warped melodicism that defines the band’s sound.

Lyrically and conceptually, the song adapts “Calypso,” the fourth episode of Ulysses, introducing protagonist Leopold Bloom as he navigates a sequence of mundane morning rituals. AGENBITE MISERY push this banality into sinister territory, using repetition, structural distortion, and grinding dissonance to reflect the bleak monotony simmering beneath everyday life. Motifs recur like intrusive thoughts, constantly familiar, perpetually destabilized.

Musically, “Cascara Sagrada” traverses a bold and unpredictable arc: a sludgy, odd-meter opening riff with sliding guitars and angular drum phrasing; a Slint-inspired indie-rock passage filled with tense chord voicings; a plunge into a psychedelic black-metal spiral; an unconventional solo section featuring core-leaning chugs, an explosive drum showcase, and a dissonant death-metal guitar lead; and finally, an extended crescendo of supreme dissonance, slowing in tempo as the band grinds between two unnerving chords, culminating in an uncomfortably powerful resolution.