REVIEW: Gridfailure - Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III: Acquiring A Taste

With Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III: Acquiring A Taste, GRIDFAILURE deliver the most ambitious and punishing entry yet in their sprawling five-album arc, chronicling humanity’s collapse. At over 80 minutes across 15 tracks, this third installment is both monumental and suffocating, a dense slab of experimental dread that refuses to offer its audience a moment of reprieve. The series, which began with Survivor’s Remorse and As Resources Are Depleted So Are Morals, maps a grim descent through the Anthropocene, and this chapter represents the moment where humanity doesn’t merely suffer its fate, but embraces it. Exploring cannibalism, enslavement, and addiction to homicide, the album’s subtitle makes it clear that civilisation isn’t just falling apart - it’s celebrating its own monstrous undoing.

The album begins with Subdividing The Survivors, a wordless opener where anguished screams twist beneath sorrowful instrumentals. It’s not just scene-setting, it’s immersion into a world already undone, forcing the listener into the aftermath before the story even begins. By the time the guttural violence of Drunk On The Blood Of My Neighbor arrives, the concept is laid bare: survival at all costs, even if that survival means consuming your fellow human, The track’s distorted vocals, proclaiming “we must feed to endure”, leave the listener questioning whether these acts are born from desperation or a perverse enjoyment of brutality.

Elsewhere, instrumental interludes like Ration Distribution/Processed For Storage push the narrative forward without a word needed. Its buzzing lights, mechanical hums, and mournful piano conjure images of dehumanised survival, of warehouses storing resources both organic and otherwise. Far from filler, these moments highlight GRIDFAILURE’s skill at world-building through sound design, letting the listener’s imagination fill in the bleakest gaps.

The colossal title track is the album’s centrepiece and breaking point. At nearly 15 minutes, Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III: Acquiring A Taste turns the record inside out. Opening with rhyming lyrics that feel like a corrupted nursery rhyme, the track plays with grotesque juxtapositions, mocking humanity as “lower than scum”. As the piece progresses, the vocals collapse into distortion, drowning in waves of harsh electronics and chaotic instrumentations, mirroring the disintegration of civilisation. It’s not easy listening, but that’s precisely the point: GRIDFAILURE aims to confront, not comfort.

The finale, Transmissions Cease, is chilling in its restraint. Morse code pulses through a haze of echoing voices and mechanical textures, evoking the desperate last signals of survivors calling into the void. As the music dissolves into the sounds of birds and distant dogs, the silence is deafening. Humanity is gone, but nature remains. The apocalypse is complete.

Musically, GRIDFAILURE mastermind DAVID BRENNER marshals an astonishing array of sounds and collaborators. Alongside his own work on vocals, guitar, bass, percussion, synths, violin, and even field recordings, BRENNER enlists contributions from a staggering cast, including STEVE AUSTIN, LEILA ADBUL-RAUF, MAC GOLLEHON, and many more. This lineup brings a unique texture and unpredictability to the record, with excursions into avant jazz, folk, techno, and Americana all woven into GRIDFAILURE’s foundation of post-industrial horror. If the project’s earlier works flirted with genre boundaries, Acquiring A Taste obliterates them.

It’s difficult to overstate how massive this album feels, both in scope and execution. At 15 tracks, with only a few under four minutes, its sheer length can feel especially intimidating for those unfamiliar with GRIDFAILURE or the traditions of the dark ambient and drone genres. This isn’t a record designed for casual sampling, with its impact coming from its totality, from the way it builds a narrative of decline track by track. Listeners simply dipping in and out may find themselves adrift, but those willing to surrender to the full arc will experience a nightmarish vision that is as compelling as it is harrowing. 

What makes Acquiring A Taste so effective, beyond its ambition, is its proximity to reality. GRIDFAILURE’s dystopia doesn’t feel far-fetched or fantastical, but uncomfortably close. Extreme weather events, social decay, and violence normalised as necessity are all horrors explored by this album, and are all extrapolations of truths already present in our world. This resonance makes it more than a concept album - it is a warning.  That said though, the very elements that make this album so powerful also make it somewhat inaccessible, Its length, uncompromising intensity, and genre fluidity demand patience, and some may dismiss it as too ‘edgy’ or confrontational to give it the time it deserves. For those already invested in experimental extremes, the record is a dark triumph, but for the uninitiated it may feel like a challenge too far.

It’s undeniable that GRIDFAILURE has crafted something gargantuan, bleak, and unforgettable. However, whether you can stomach it is another question entirely.

Score: 7/10

Sixth Mass-Extinction Skulduggery III: Acquiring A Taste will be released on October 3rd 2025 via Nefarious Industries.

Words: Zuzanna Pazola

Photos: Gridfailure