Diät
Positive Disintegration
Iron Lung Records
February 22, 2019

As a band with little social media presence, Diät’s been super quiet on the music front since they put out Positive Energy in 2015. Honestly, I’d been wondering recently if they were still together, and then I opened YouTube and lo and behold, someone had uploaded Positive Disintegration.

Positive Disintegration is described on the band’s bandcamp page as a follow-up album years in the making, or a potential companion piece to Positive Energy. Positive Disintegration didn’t disappoint at all, and you can actually see tremendous growth between this and their 2015 release.

Like Positive Energy, Positive Disintegration was also mastered by Daniel Husayn, of North London Bomb Factory Mastering. As someone that knows Daniel and how closely he listens to music, I always get extremely excited when I see that a band I like is working with him.

Positive Disintegration opens with the track ‘We.’ The song has repetitive beats and echos, with lyrics that are more spoken than sung, culminating in an absolutely enchanting introduction to the album.

As a whole, I find that Positive Disintegration has a really intense buildup from track to track. Individually, the tracks are amazing, but when you listen to the songs in order it gives you a bit of a chill. The second track ‘Foreign Policy’ has a much faster, somewhat poppier pace, which contrasts in a really powerful way with the song’s lyrics.

‘W.I.G.T.D.W.M?,’ is much heavier on the synth than other tracks. The following track, ‘Disintegrate,’ gave me a similar vibe, with the buildup picking back up on track five ‘Dogshit.’

Although I say ‘Disintegrate’ and ‘W.I.G.T.D.W.M?’ have similar vibes, I think every song on this album is fairly different from the one before it, which is part of what creates the unique atmosphere of the album.

‘Only My Own,’ is a super danceable track. ‘Missed the Bus’ is probably the most different track, based on my own perception of the band’s typical sound. The closing song ‘Opfer’ seems to tie together a lot of the other elements explored in the various songs throughout the album.

I have some tracks that really stand out to me, or more like, there’s specific buildups between some of the tracks that really give me chills – ‘We’ and ‘Foreign Policy,’ and then ‘Only My Own’ and ‘Missed the Bus,’ for example.

I love modern post-punk. Honestly, can anyone better depict the bleakness of life than people from this generation?

I know it’s barely March, but I’m calling it now, this is going to be on my top ten for 2019. I hope we get some tour dates from Diät off the back of this.

-Linsey McFadden