Toronto duo Dermabrasion have peddled their fleshy post-punk in and around their home town with a deceptively ferocious live show. Dermabrasion’s 2021 demo EP Lunate marked a return to form for members Adam Bernhardt and Kat McGouran, who started writing and performing together in 2015 with defunct Toronto punk band WLMRT. The five tracks on Lunate, with a low-fi production that smacks of early Sisters of Mercy recordings, offered only a haunting, shadowy outline of what the pair now bring forward with their full-length debut.
A fascination with the corporeal form and the occult threads through Dermabrasion’s Pain Behaviour (Hand Drawn Dracula Records). With allusions to Roman Catholicism, LaVeyan Satanism and genre fiction, the songs investigate shame, power, duty and inhabiting a human body. Produced by Josh Korody (Fucked Up, Nailbiter, Breeze, Beliefs, Traitrs), the album’s statement is honed to a menacing edge with a sound swinging in the directions of first wave and contemporary post-punk, industrial, and early metal.
Photo by Shelby Wilson (@whyistoothpasteblue on Instagram)
