Lub
Listen to Misanthrope
Format: Digital and Vinyl
Release date: 10 October 2025
Solitude & self-preservation through destruction define the core principles behind Lub, the debut album of Berlin-based, Portuguese artist SOF. Eschewing social forms of musical structure that delimit pre-fabricated tropes, SOF carves out a dissonant anarchitecture that—while still managing to be a panegyric to metal & noise—elicits a singular vocabulary of chaos, disorder & rupture.
Lub is a celebration and radical affirmation of the sovereign individual striving toward autonomy, as one who can overcome the norms that continue to lead society into its current numbness. The raw power, excess & virulence of disfiguring distortion serves here as a palimpsest where all sonic elements conspire. & yet, there is a constant sensation that the fragments could well fall apart at any moment, that the overdriven lines might be losing bits, that we (as listeners) can only cope with snippets of this pareidoliac chaoid.
The tracks are mid to slow tempo, with themes of existential anxiety, cultural conditioning & political entrapment. The overdriven guitars wail against clipped drums that oscillate between blast beats & doom grooves. The dark, atmospheric synths counterpoint agonizing screams. Its oversaturated atmosphere beckons the listener to catch glimpses of the clamorous depths of an inner revolution. Lub is a document of SOF's unrelenting thirst.
The album is released as a collaboration between Soft Commodity and Perf.
Tracklist:
1. Misanthrope
2.Frost
3.Perv
4.Violent Hermit
5.Dazzling
6.Lub
7.Tryptamine
8.Holo
9.In His Eyes, Rotten Inside
All tracks produced by SOF
Mastered by James Ó Ceallaigh
Cut by Frédéric Alstadt
PRE-ORDER
SOF appeals to a revolution of consciousness, values, self-awareness, and self-worth through themes of radical political, social, and cultural destruction, alongside a deep skepticism toward heritage and religion. At the bottom of this emotional and creative core lies a profound fascination with chaos, not as abstraction, but as a social response. Psychotic and impenetrable, the practice holds close to the languages of aggression and disorder, using them as tools to question the logics of human morality, mortality, and ethics.
sof_unofficial
Perf, Sonic Rituals and Speculative Futures
Perf is not just a label, it is a curator of metaphysical thresholds, and a conduit for the esoteric edges of contemporary experimental music. Emerging from Portugal’s fertile underground, exists at the nexus of ritual and futurism serving as both an amplifier and an incubator for artists who explore the boundaries of sound.
Launched with the debut of Amuleto Apotropaico, Perf revealed its grounding in sonic mysticism and the deeply regional. That release–drawn from years of live ritual and sculpted into a brutalist liturgy of rhythm and density–set a tone: one of noise-as-ceremony, of improvisation as invocation. Amuleto Apotropaico, with their roots in the folklore of Northern Iberia and their ears turned toward the abyss, offer a kind of time-looped spirituality, where each beat is both ancient and entirely new. Perf gave that project its home, not as a document of nostalgia but as a construction of myth in real time. But Perf's vision is no less futuristic than it is ancestral.
The label’s release of Jonathan Uliel Saldanha’s Surface Disorder further cements its position at the frontier of synthetic and speculative sound. Saldanha's work, spanning installation and composition, is paranoid, post-human, and devastatingly meticulous. With AI oracles (The Mouth), morphing sonic detritus, and digital fever dreams, Perf gives voice to a broader fascination with the uncanny and the apocalyptic sublime. Here, sound isn’t just expressive, it’s viral, generative, and recursive.
What unites these releases is a commitment to sound as praxis: noise as a system of belief, signal as transformation, distortion as architecture. Whether through the rhythmic invocations of Amuleto Apotropaico or the cybernetic hauntings of Uliel Saldanha, Perf fosters a catalogue that treats audio not merely as content, but as event–an unfolding, an encounter, a revelation.
Perf isn’t building a scene, it’s creating a realm.
perf.hq
bandcamp
soundcloud