Cobrafuma - Droga Total

Droga Total [Total Drug] is a carefully crafted set of revolutionary analogies, perfectly aligned with the overall feeling of listening to Cobrafuma new opus: it is as furious as scorching metal, something made clear in the vociferous proto-revolutionary lyrics of the Porto founded heavy rock band.

For each of the seven songs, which aesthetically do resemble metal music, extreme music is just a means to the end that is the intoxicating feeling of anger and revolt driven by faster guitars, harsher distortions, and more pounding drums. Their drug is the riff within their boiling hate, driving them wilder. Like an ouroboros, the snake consumes itself in a pyrotechnical burst in seven acts. In the forge for two years, the new set of songs melts the urgency of metal with the dark humour of rock’n’roll. Droga Total comes out as harsher, braver, but also more sarcastic and biting on the lyrical front, with witty and sharp takes. Portuguese-speaking listeners will be cursed with traditional tavern-inspired tropes, intoxicated remarks that any working  class person will relate to — if their self-titled record started at the counter pounding wine and moonshine, its following picks up the bottles to recycle them in the brewing of molotov cocktails for the incoming revolution. The violence of the sound is only matched by their dragging of one percenters and the enemies of the people in growling vocals that are, nonetheless, clever enough to cover them in venomous and virulentridicule. 

“Droga Total”, their metal sprint of thrashing, high-speed guitars, emulates the sensation of the billionaire’s Soilent Green-like pursuit for the ultimate drug, the sacrifice of everything and everyone. The opener “Trabalho” sets the tone for the album, a death’n’roll ode to the revolution, where guitar solos, groovy palm mutes and melodic bursts lead to the ecstatic chorus calling for the raised fists. The closing sequence of “Hoje é o Dia”, “Tiro no Escuro” e “Humildade” makes it clear their revolution, just their total drug, is not about the end, but rather all about the process. Riffs are forever, so is their anger.

Cobrafuma’s Droga Total is not your prototypical metal record. It inhales rock’s decadence, groove and lyrical prowess, and exhales it in smoking hot, out-of-control riffing rage. 

Not unlike Clockwork Orange’s infamous totaalvoetbal, all the extremes come in play for a hallucinated carousel of fast, furious, distorted songs that borrow as much from punk in the pounding d-beat drumming, from thrash in the screeching solos, as they do from death’n’roll’s guitar tone, or sludge’s heavy but steady riffing. 

Their totality is geographic, covering all terrains of extreme music, and conceptual, reaching to rock’n’roll’s traditions of crafting ideas and lyrics and imbuing their songs with witty metaphors and analogies to create powerful, liberating ideas. Cobrafuma does not abide by any cult; its creed is the adrenaline of the riff, its mass is the mockery of the powerful, its prayers are sheer sonic ecstasy. 

A famous Portuguese poet once said that religion is the opium of the people. Cobrafuma replaced it with a more powerful, new drug.