Call it post-metal or call it sludge — the name matters less than what Oxide actually do with instrumental heavy music. The Oakland band treat atmosphere like architecture: build the pressure tight enough and the rest does itself. “Is It Dead…Or Dormant,” featuring Thoabath and premiering today, started from a conversation about parasitic fungi and one word that refused to leave the room.
“We’d been talking about parasitic fungi that take over insects — how they don’t just kill the host, but use it, steering behavior to make propagation inevitable,” the band say. “At some point someone mentioned that those spores don’t survive in hot-blooded animals… yet. That ‘yet’ stuck with us. How long until something dormant adapts?”
That’s where the title came from — not as a story idea, but as “a state of tension between stillness and inevitability.” The working title, for what it’s worth, was “There’s No Way This Raccoon Could Possibly Have Rabies.” Oxide don’t take themselves too seriously, and the contrast — half-serious conversations that slide somewhere darker — is baked into how they approach the whole project. Heavy concepts, no precious handling.
Without lyrics, the whole thing rides on pacing. “The music and visuals have to do all the talking,” the band explain. “That made the build especially important — knowing where to hold back, where repetition starts to feel uncomfortable, and how long to delay release so the unease can properly settle before things finally start to shift.” Even the climax, they’re quick to point out, isn’t really one. It’s “pressure finally deforming something that’s been contained for too long.”
Thoabath, who features on the track, was brought back because Oxide already knew from prior work that he could hold that kind of slow, simmering tension without telegraphing it. His contribution shapes the restraint and imbalance at the core of the song — something closer to sensed than heard.
The video, directed by Indonesian filmmaker Doni Rawan, works the same way. Rawan also shot Oxide’s previous clip for “Stoic,” and the band wanted to keep building on that. “The idea wasn’t to illustrate the song directly, but to sit alongside it — creating something that feels familiar at first, then gradually destabilized,” Oxide say. There was also a conscious decision to loosely link the two videos: same actor, recurring imagery, a shared visual language that hints at a longer arc without spelling it out.
What happens on screen follows the same rules. A woman’s face blurs and smears in the green overgrowth of what looks like tropical forest. Later she’s on a pile of cut wood, cradling a small white paper figure — a little rabbit cutout, maybe a spirit object, maybe nothing. Two chalky apparitions leap across a painted blue scene of mountains, horns lifted. Black veins crack across her face as she stares directly into the lens. In the final stretch she’s standing on rock, hooded, watching another body lying prone in white cloth at the edge of frame. Nothing is announced or resolved.
Rather than telling a story in a traditional sense, the goal was to put the viewer inside a mood — something that lingers physically more than intellectually.
“In some places the visuals reinforce the tension in the music; in others they subtly contradict it, just enough to keep things feeling ‘off’ even after it ends,” the band note.
The EP is on the way. Watch “Is It Dead…Or Dormant” now.
