Portugal’s Descrente and their debut EP, O Tribunal dos Ingénuos—or “The Court of the Naive” in English—drops like a slab of concrete, rough-edged and unapologetic.
A two-piece outfit steeped in the murkier waters of post-punk, they pull from the raw nerve of Rudimentary Peni’s frantic dissonance, Bauhaus’s gothic sprawl, and Amebix’s crust-laden heft.
Descrente’s sound is a deliberate collision of influences—early Killing Joke’s jagged tension, Vex’s shadowy pulse, Part 1’s grim urgency—blended with deathrock’s theatrical decay, think Christian Death or Samhain.
Add a hefty dose of anarcho-punk’s righteous fury via Crass and Flux of Pink Indians, and you’ve got a band that’s as much a political Molotov as it is a sonic gut punch.
The EP’s backbone is a concept that cuts deep: punk’s promise of community and counterculture warped into something hollow.
Specifically, they’re dissecting the scene in Portugal, where the duo—two minds bonded by a shared disdain for half-measures—see a troubling mimicry of the very power structures punk claims to reject. “It’s the oppressed becoming the oppressor,” they say, a phrase that hangs heavy over the release.
What should be a bastion of mutual support twists into hierarchies, a gentrified shell of spiky hair and leather jackets, drained of its political spine.
They call it “a hedonistic dance of the blind”—a line that stings with bitter clarity. It’s not everywhere, they admit; in other corners of the world, punk still burns with its original ideals. But here, in their immediate orbit, it’s a performance, and Descrente’s response is to scream it in Portuguese, their native tongue a vessel for metaphor and masked truths.
Opener “Cega Justiça” (“Blind Justice”) barrels in with an Amebix-inspired thud—think No Sanctuary’s relentless churn, but cranked to a feral 10. A dissonant, percussive stomp runs beneath it all, refusing to let up, as the lyrics wrestle with the hypocrisy of judgment from those too blind to see their own flaws. It’s loud, it’s raw, and it doesn’t care if you’re comfortable.
Then comes the twin punch of “Marasmo de Inveja” 1 and 2—“Marasmus of Envy”—tied together by a recurring riff that slinks through both tracks like a deathrock specter. The mood is bleak, the tone almost suffocating, as they dig into how envy festers when vision falters, starving the spirit. Part 2 ends in a chaotic swell of church bells, a ritualistic purge that feels less like redemption and more like a grim exorcism. The weight of it sticks.
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Closing out the EP, “Torres de Marfim” (“Ivory Towers”) shifts gears into a slow, mournful crawl. It’s their anti-capitalist anthem, veiled in metaphor, and it drips with a sadness that hits harder than any shouted slogan. The vocals here owe a debt to Portugal’s own Mão Morta, whose shape-shifting grandeur looms large—less a direct lift, more a shared instinct for turning gloom into something majestic.
The artwork, crafted by @violence.paranoia—known for gritty collaborations with Discharge, False Fed (featuring members of Discharge, Amebix, and Nausea), and Iggor Cavalera—is a stark image of someone peeling their own skin away.
It’s not subtle: “removing the mask,” they call it, a metaphor for baring every raw, unfiltered piece of yourself. It’s a holistic extension of the music, a bleak companion to the EP’s sonic snarl.
Released on A World Divided—a label carving out space for bands from overlooked corners of the globe—O Tribunal dos Ingénuos is already catching eyes. Talks with other labels hint at re-releases abroad, a sign this Portuguese duo’s reach might soon stretch beyond their borders. For now, they’re hunkered down, writing a full-length and plotting live shows to bring this jagged vision to the stage.
Punk, they insist, has to be political. Their anarchist roots run deep, but this isn’t a soapbox. The personal bleeds through every track, cloaked in metaphor, delivered with a post-punk slant that trades punk’s blunt force for something less direct, more insidious.
The Court of the Naive is a autopsy of punk’s failures, laid bare in four tracks that refuse to let the rot go unnoticed.
