EbE404 Cortisol premiere in Other Voices
Other Voices is premiering Cortisol, the third full-length from Minneapolis producer EbE404, out August 21st on GIVE/TAKE. The album collects nine long-form pieces of drone, noise and power ambient, and it treats the title literally: this is a record built around a hormone, and it plays like one, rising and falling instead of building toward a chorus.
Streaming the EbE404 Cortisol premiere in full
EbE404 Cortisol is available to pre-order now ahead of its August 21st release on CD and digital through GIVE/TAKE. There’s no streaming version on Spotify, and that omission is deliberate rather than an oversight. More on that below.
The record follows Tedium and Loss, EbE404’s 2020 debut, and the continuity between the two is audible. Where the earlier record worked in shorter cycles, Cortisol stretches out. Nine tracks, almost no track under what sounds like six or seven minutes. It asks for headphones and an hour you’re not getting back.
1. Have A Seat, the System Will Be With You Shortly (6:17)
2. That’s It, Big Smile, Everybody’s Happy (7:56)
3. Indecision In the System (6:11)
4. Grass Time (8:53)
5. Stockholm (2:36)
6. Learning the System (4:02)
7. A Spell Of Singing Snakes (5:53)
8. Doomscroll (9:58)
9. The New System (8:29)
The stress hormone as album concept
Cortisol is what your body releases when it decides something is a threat, whether or not that something is real. EbE404 uses the word as a structural principle: the album traces a rise and fall, not a narrative arc. There’s no resolution built in, because the thing it’s describing, chronic low-grade alarm, doesn’t resolve either.
The artist frames it directly in the press notes: the record documents living through “fascism, the worst people in the world, the execution of empathy, and a life being shaped by algorithms and a digital universe that is utterly detached from the real world.” That’s a lot to hang on nine instrumental tracks, and the record doesn’t try to argue the point so much as recreate the physiological state underneath it. You don’t need the artist statement to feel it. You need it to name it.
Minneapolis gets a specific mention too, described as a strange place to make art in this period, and the album is dedicated, in the artist’s words, “for the rebel loons.”
Sound: the Coil and Throbbing Gristle lineage
The reference points GIVE/TAKE offers, Coil’s Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil period and Throbbing Gristle’s Third Mind Movement era, are accurate enough to be useful and specific enough to set expectations. Both are records that use repetition as a form of pressure rather than comfort, and Cortisol works the same way. Layers accumulate instead of resolving into a hook.
Where EbE404 distinguishes the material is in the mixing. The press materials point to spatial placement, phase manipulation and frequency interaction as the tools doing the work, and on a close listen that tracks: individual layers shift position rather than just volume, so a drone that sits center in one pass can feel like it’s approaching from the side a few minutes later. It’s a production choice more than a compositional one, but on a record this sparse in melodic information, production is most of the argument. Small movements read as large ones when there’s nothing else competing for attention.
Nine tracks in this mode is a real commitment from a listener, and Cortisol doesn’t soften that. There’s a slight rhythmic pulse threaded through some of the pieces, but it functions more as a heartbeat under duress than as anything you’d call a beat. Call it dark ambient with the industrial framing intact rather than sanded down for playlist consumption, because nobody involved in this release seems interested in playlist consumption.
The no-Spotify, anti-AI stance
GIVE/TAKE is releasing EbE404 Cortisol without a Spotify presence, framing the decision as part of an anti-AI approach to how the record gets marketed and discovered. The label’s note is blunt about it: any exposure the album gets online will come from actual listeners passing it along, not from a recommendation algorithm doing the work.
It’s worth taking at face value rather than dismissing as a positioning exercise, given the album’s own subject matter. A record about the toll of algorithmic mediation choosing to opt out of the platform most defined by algorithmic mediation is at minimum a coherent decision, and it puts weight on outlets like this one to actually do the work of pointing people toward it. Whether the strategy holds up commercially is a separate question from whether it’s consistent with what the record is about. On that front, it is.
EbE404 Cortisol releases worldwide on CD and digital August 21st via GIVE/TAKE. Pre-orders are open now.