Dystopiate: Filth Film
Photo: Kelly Preziosi
Boston's Dystopiate return with Filth Film, a scorched-earth, 28-minute assault that doesn't so much play as detonate. Recorded at Tom Preziosi's Studio Dystope in Townsend, MA across most of 2025, the album arrives after a lineup shakeup left the band down to a two-piece — Cody Maillet on bass and vocals, Preziosi handling every guitar track. Rather than thin out the sound, the reduced lineup seems to have sharpened it into something meaner and more feral.
This is not an album built for comfort. From the opening title track, Filth Film wastes no time establishing its intent. Blistering d-beat drumming and a relentless wall of cymbals crash against Maillet's throat-shredding vocals, which sound more like a man venting real fury at the world than “singing”. "Infiltrator" opens with a chopped, martial drum pattern before collapsing into full hardcore chaos, while "Lysergic" leans into minor-key dissonance for a genuinely unsettling, "bad-trip" atmosphere that lives up to its name.
The record's most interesting moments come when it briefly interrupts its own momentum. "Futile" and "You're Next" both drop out for a few seconds of instrumental space before charging back in, and those small fractures do more to build tension than a wall-to-wall assault could on its own. "Atrophy," the closer, is the album's most ambitious cut — its black-metal-tinged riffing dissolves into pure hardcore fury and back again, before ending the record entirely with tunnel-like sound effects and clanging metal, a genuinely cinematic touch that hints at where this band could go next.
Art by Keith Browder
Elsewhere, Dystopiate leans hard into old-school hardcore lineage — Circle Jerks comparisons on "Lurking Inside" are bleeding through — while "Whistlin' Dixie" stands out as the album's loosest, most "fun" moment, trading pure noise for an almost bluesy, headbang-ready groove.
Filth Film is a short, abrasive and unrelenting album by design. It does it’s job exceedingly well. For fans of crust and d-beat who want their hardcore delivered with genuine menace rather than polish, Dystopiate will deliver to you in full.
Get the album Filth Film at I Heart Noise | Bandcamp now.
