Review: Failure – Dulling the Razorblade (Demo)
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Review by Rick Eaglestone
Failure – Dulling the Razorblade (Demo)
Record Label: Independent
Year: 2026
Rating: 7/10
Depressive Black Metal has always been the most solitary corner of an already isolationist genre — a music made alone, in bedrooms, for reasons that rarely announce themselves. Failure, the sole work of a UK musician credited only as Kenna, belongs squarely to that lineage. Conceived in June 2023 but then left dormant for want of the will to begin, the project only cohered in May 2026, when, by the artist’s own account, the ideas finally arrived. Dulling The Razorblade is the result: a three-track debut demo, written in May and recorded the following month, which makes no attempt to disguise what it is or where it comes from.
At nineteen minutes this is a demo in the truest sense, a first statement rather than a finished thesis and it wears the format’s limitations without apology. Kenna handles everything here: guitars, bass, vocals, lyrics, drum programming, mixing and the cover art, with only the logo (by Suffering, of A Life to Suffer) farmed out. That total authorship is central to the record’s character; DSBM has always been a genre of one-person projects, where the isolation of the making is inseparable from the music itself, and Failure is faithful to that model down to the last detail. The mix is raw but competent; the guitars sit in the familiar DSBM register, trebly, corroded, tremolo-picked into a grey wash while the programmed drums keep a deliberately unhurried pulse beneath, more a metronome for the misery than a driving force.
This is not the ice-clear precision of the Swedish orthodox school, nor the widescreen sweep of the atmospheric wing the genre has drifted toward in recent years. It is closer to the lineage of Xasthur, early Shining and the bedroom-recorded desolation that first defined the subgenre: atmosphere prioritised over fidelity, mood over muscle, feeling over finish.
Opener The Light Crawled Out My Veins sets the palette without hurry. A single tremolo figure establishes itself and then simply persists, the repetition doing the emotional work, before the vocals arrive as a distant, lacerated shriek buried in the mix rather than perched on top of it. It is a deliberate choice, and a genre-appropriate one, the voice as texture rather than focal point, one more layer of erosion in the wash rather than a narrator standing above it. At just under seven minutes the track asks for patience, and its slow accretion of dread rewards those willing to sit inside it.
Disposable is the demo’s centrepiece by length and by weight. At almost nine minutes it is the most ambitious thing here, and the closest the record comes to justifying its runtime. The title’s theme: abandonment, worthlessness is legible in the music’s construction: riffs that build toward something and then withdraw before resolution, a structure of repeated approach and retreat that mirrors its subject. There is a passage in the middle third where the distortion thins and a cleaner guitar line surface, and it is the most affecting moment on the record — the point where Failure’s evident influences give way to something that feels genuinely felt rather than merely inherited. It is also where the demo’s limitations are most audible: the programmed drums, workmanlike elsewhere, struggle to carry the dynamic shifts the writing reaches for.
Closer Months Lost To Limerence abandons vocals altogether. An instrumental of three and a half minutes, it functions as a comedown a slow, minor-key figure left to unwind without the abrasion of the preceding tracks. “Limerence,” the involuntary, obsessive fixation on another person, is a precise and unusually literate choice of title, and the track earns it, trading aggression for a kind of exhausted melancholy. It is the record’s quietest gesture and, in some ways, its most confident: proof that Kenna understands restraint as well as intensity and can hold an atmosphere without hiding behind volume.
What Dulling The Razorblade shows is a set of instincts already worth trusting: an ear for atmosphere, the patience to let a track breathe and on Disposable and the closing instrumental especially with moments that feel personal rather than borrowed. The subject matter is heavy, unflinchingly so, and nothing here tries to soften it; whether that pulls a listener closer or keeps them at a distance will come down to their appetite for the tradition Failure is working inside. Taken for what it is, a construction it holds together with real conviction. If this is where Failure begins, the more compelling question is where it goes next.
Failure – Dulling the Razorblade (Demo)
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