Photo Credit: Rodrigo Vargas
Choke on This, the defiant new alternative metal album from Stereophobia, is more than a gut punch. It is a blast in the face that widens your eyes, buzzsaws your back, and rocks your bones right down to the marrow. Hard rock at its finest, the rich guitar sound is a precious collection of aesthetic “schitzo-riffs,” each an exotic treasure dazzling in the dark and leading us to the caverns and haunts of our deepest repressions. The bass is a booming series of tactical nukes, and the power-drumming gets in your blood, enlarges your heart, and rattles your ribcage. The album isn’t subtle. Play the “f” out of it, and for “eff’n” God’s sake, play it loud!
About the band:
Stereophobia are an alternative metal band from Lisbon, Portugal, and they will blow your mind like an M-80 in a paper lampshade! They feature a massive guitar sound, a thundering bass, and a percussive pound and burn that resonates like a war-drum. At times, the growl vocal rips apart your vertebrae and at others, it pulses like a redeyed jackal watching from the shadows. We suggest you give them a listen. Today. Now.
Though the band formed in 2019, they evolved into the current power trio format back in 2022. Stereophobia are Mike Rocha (guitars and vocals), Daniel Antunes (drums and backing vocals), and Bruno Santos (bass guitar), and their debut record, No One Cares was released in 2023. And now, fully realized, Stereophobia unveil their new album, Choke on This, and on first listen we can’t help but notice that this is far more than “music.” This is a statement straight from the mind of Mike Rocha, reanimated and diabolically rearranged by Antunes and Santos, a smoking potion, loaded hot like a shot. In terms of the focus tracks on the new record, they are ghostly sketches of who we are and the monsters we have made of ourselves.
The song Maggots is all about infection starting with the “Constant buzzing inside my ears,” and evolving to the “Demons in my head pushing me around.” We are trapped in the asylum, where the only cure is a numbing insanity brought on by psycho surgeons, mad scientists, cannibal coroners, and a slew of perverted nurses. By the time we stumble into the second focus track titled, Uncle Clarke’s (Made Me Do It), we are prisoners in our self-made cages, crafting suicide pacts while “Locked in chains / And eating rats.”
The third focus track, Freak Show, brings us full circle where we have become an army of escaped miscreants, coming to consume anything in our paths to get revenge for the pureness in us that was stolen and trashed. “The freaks are coming” and all you newbies “will be swallowed by the faces.” Get your ass ready. This is not a drill. In terms of musicality, Mike Rocha’s guitar sounds are an amazing collection of sonic bursts as unique and varied as the elements in a color chart.
In a real sense, he has reinvented “the riff,” making the rhythm tracks in the verses less like background and more like adventures. The vocals are just as eclectic, often a fierce growl and other times, a traditional voice, somehow both tentative and bold and wholly relatable. The drums are insane, especially the snare and machine-gunning toms, and the bass is addicted to the rhythm pattern, sticking closer than a brother and pounding out the band’s footprint in the sand.
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