Horrormind

Horrormind — sometimes written as Horror Mind — emerged in São Paulo in 2003 as part of the city's combative wave of millennial deathgrind bands who fused grindcore velocity with death metal weight, black metal misanthropy, and a deliberately blasphemous anti-Christian lyrical posture. The band self-described their sound as Horror Mind's Blasfemic Destruction, a mouthful that says everything about the era: SP's underground in the mid-2000s was hostile, sectarian, and proudly extreme, and Horrormind set themselves squarely against the religious mainstream that still dominates Brazilian public life. Their 2006 demo — fifteen short, vicious tracks with titles like Comida de Verme, Vi Vi Vi, and Templo da Desgraça — is the kind of artifact that defines a specific micro-era of paulista grind: harsh, low-budget, ugly in the most affectionate sense, and recorded with the urgency of musicians who knew the window for releasing this kind of thing was already narrowing. They played notable underground shows including the second edition of the appropriately named Impalando o Nazareno, sharing stages with peers like Life is Lies, Lastima, Liberpênsulo, and Lapso, which neatly maps the network of São Paulo deathgrind bands trading members and bills throughout that period. Horrormind sit in the lineage of Brazilian grind that runs from Brigada do Ódio and Rot down through the modern paulista underground — sectarian, anti-religious, contemptuous of fashion, and built entirely on the conviction that the more uncomfortable extreme metal makes the listener, the better it is doing its job. A relic of one of South America's most uncompromising grind scenes.