Buñuel share the frenetic new single “Class” from their fourth full-length album Mansuetude, a co-release between SKiN GRAFT and Overdrive, arriving 25th October 2024.
About the track Eugene S. Robinson comments, “America is schizophrenic about class and class attributes. On the one hand we claim it doesn’t exist here, on the other hand like Paul Fussell lays out in his book on class it works its way through every aspect of American life and living. The song itself eviscerates the notion by placing it where it most needs to be placed: in the iD fuelled underworld.”
The title, Mansuetude – meaning “meekness” or “gentleness” – might seem like a juxtaposition when listening to the record that is, in Eugene’s words, “extreme but articulate”, however the record aims to convey a balancing of different forces and shades of being which make up the human experience. Throughout Mansuetude, Buñuel take every given opportunity to stretch out their musical tendrils towards discomfort, surrealism, and the deconstruction of tradition, as they reach absolute abandon. They go well beyond the realm of noise rock, encompassing many moods from post-hardcore to avant-noise, hard-blues to post-industrial, symphonic to trash metal and even free-jazz.
Drummer Franz comments that “Buñuel is a name that embodies a certain cultural and literary reference, which evokes an entire world. Like his films, our Buñuel is surrealism. We take the listeners into a place that’s suspended between dream and reality.”
“What we’re doing with Buñuel is to carve out a very specific glimpse… partly into hearts of darkness, but more specifically into the depth of our secrets,” says Eugene. “Secrets we keep from each other, ourselves and whatever futures we’ve imagined for ourselves. We are ultimately trying to communicate something direct and deadly about the human condition.”
Buñuel makes music for those of us willing to take a closer, unflinching look at the depths of human instinct, and on Mansuetude the band extend their reach farther than before, creating an album that is akin to a powerful impulse, or perhaps even an exorcism.
Mansuetude is a double album with three sides. A balancing act performed for and by the unbalanced.
MANSUETUDE TRACK LISTING:
01 Who Missed Me
02 Drug Burn
03 Class
04 Movement No. 201
05 Bleat (with Jacob Bannon of Converge)
06 A Killing On The Beach
07 Leather Bar
08 High.Speed.Chase.
09 American Steel (with Duane Dension of the Jesus Lizard)
10 Fixer (with Megan Osztrosits of Couch Slut)
11 Trash
12 Pimp
13 A Room In Berlin