Folks, gang, chat: this is one that I have been REALLY looking forward to.  In a year that keeps delivering surprise after surprise, I started 2026 out being absolutely floored by last year’s Visual Kill, an album that I discovered with days left in 2025 and that basically has become my soundtrack for this year.  To hear, then, that Saidan already had the follow-up waiting in the wings filled me with giddy delight, and Fangdriller: Scars Beneath Memories Wrist serves as both the next chapter in the overarching story for the Nashville duo, and a way to capitalize on the momentum they have built up in the interim.

Nashville is a place that is widely known as a hub for the music world, but probably not the first place you think of when you think of black metal (or visual kei, but we’ll get to that in a minute), and yet, Saidan might just be the band to put the city on the proverbial kvlt map.  Their proprietary blend of ultra-melodic black metal, punk rock and, yes, the over-the-top musical and aesthetic flair of Japan’s visual kei and Eastern horror gives them a unique place in the musical world, and it’s one that caught my eye based on presentation alone.  It also helps that the music is absolutely killer, and that killer musical foundation has exploded their popularity into the relative mainstream.  Fangdriller builds on this momentum by directly continuing the narrative journey duo of chief instrumentalist, vocalist, songwriter and engineer Splatterpvnk and drummer Hundosai have been crafting, following the story of a student named Junko who gets messily involved in the cult of Ethereal Blood.  While she believes the cult offers her solace and community, if you can believe it, there are much more sinister goings-on brewing under the surface.

If you already listened to Visual Kill and loved it, you’re going to be in for a wild ride in the best way possible.  While it’s not fair to say that Fangdriller reinvents what Saidan has been building on, it does take everything that worked so well about Visual Kill and dials it up to eleven.  The wildly evocative and borderline euphoric sense of melody that made Visual Kill so compelling to me is back and even stronger than ever.  One listen to opener “Razorblade Temptation” was enough to get me hooting and hollering all over my living room, and the album only builds from there.  The melodic black metal riffs and melodies are as razor sharp, pun intended, as they’ve ever been, and the punk rock energy borders on classic emo and post-hardcore at times, such as on “Kara No Bara” and “Her Lips Pressed Against a Coffin Nail”.  And as long as we’re praising the melodies and guitar work, it’s absolutely crazy to me how more people aren’t talking about what a goddamn guitar hero Splatterpvnk is.  The solos on this album absolutely rip, in the big and boisterous way that 80’s hair metal guitar solos do, which only adds to the extravagant theatricality that hallmarks Saidan’s brand.  All of Fangdriller is drenched in a kind of melodramatic, theater kid energy in the best way possible; black metal has always, whether people want to admit it or not, been about the show as much as it has been about the substance, and in this case, Saidan has both in spades.  Similarly, Hundosai’s drumming has to be praised as well for deftly straddling the line between frantic blast beats, death metal-inspired thrashing and punky gallops.  It would have been all too easy to program drums to Fangdriller, but the interplay, human element and collaborative spirit between the two is one of the most electrifying parts of listening to this album.  Top it all off with some crisp and bright production by Splatterpvnk themselves and you have an album that, while it doesn’t exactly break any molds, is a fucking delight to listen to, start to finish and back to start again.

“Poser” is a word thrown around again and again to describe Saidan, and unless I’m missing something I can’t figure out why.  Maybe it’s Trve Kvlt Pvrists doing what they always do, maybe it’s the fact that this kind of theatricality and expression never truly goes unpunished, but what you can’t say is that Fangdriller isn’t a good time with some serious chops to back it up.  Once again, Saidan have crafted an album that seems like it was dreamed up in a laboratory for me, specifically, but damn it all if it isn’t effective.  It’s exactly what I was hoping for, and if I wasn’t on board the train before, well…choo choo motherfuckers.

-Ian

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Fangdriller: Scars Beneath Memories Wrist is out now on Avantgarde Music.  For more information on Saidan, visit their Facebook page.