There is no such thing as background noise in Divide and Dissolve’s world. Every note, every groaning chord, every keening saxophone line sits foregrounded, heavy with intent. On Insatiable, Melbourne multi-instrumentalist Takiaya Reed’s most emotionally unguarded and orchestrally scaled work to date, doom becomes a medium for not reckoning alone, but reckoning transfigured by love.
Opener ‘Hegemonic’ isn’t so much an overture as a warning. Not of total ruin, but of deep, destabilising, possibly ecstatic change. An undulating low-end rolls like the hypocentre of a tectonic shift, a ghosted choral phrase floating above. From the first seconds, it’s clear: this is the sound of foundations being unsettled. At arguably her least ‘heavy’ – whatever that has ever truly meant – Reed has rarely sounded more direct or more devastating in purpose.
If 2021’s Gas Lit doubled as unfuckwithable declaration, and 2023’s Systemic traced the hidden architecture of harm with analytical control, Insatiable dares to dwell in the wreckage. It mourns. It repeats. And, to my ears, it really, really hopes. Now writing, performing and composing solo, Reed’s control over every texture is total. Each blitz and each breath has been placed with vision. Doom has become process while thematic softness hits like its own kind of resistance. It’s a sound that reshapes grief into something not just survivable but sublime. Not just loud but deeply, fearlessly alive.
The album’s title came to Reed in a dream, and the record moves accordingly: wave-like, sometimes spiralling, impossibly hard to contain. ‘Monolithic’ follows ‘Hegemonic’ and summons the arc of Systemic-peak, ‘Indignation’: the bleeding of majesty into searing heft. Its descent might seem repulsed by the world it excavates, but this repulsion is wide-eyed, anchored in what Reed calls “a repetitive motion of love: love of self, love of other people, love of community… hopes and dreams reinforcing themselves over and over in hopes that something will change. Because that’s all we have.”
That’s because there is no trade-off between heft and heavenly reveal. Here, Reed pairs them more fluidly than ever. On Systemic, she wove swooning, swirling sax into mantle-tearing doom. That folding motion returns here with rare mastery. It’s not a blend but a bloom that feels structural and, honestly, sacred. “It’s an album about love, and it feels important to tap into that, now more than ever,” Reed has said. That sense of devotion underpins the record: repetition not as stasis but as prayer. Insatiable doesn’t rage to destroy. It repeats to remember.
Take ‘Loneliness’. Leading with a low spell before ascending into an aria-like sax motif, it plays like a paean for inherited solitude. There’s a rare gothic pull to it all: sublime and serpentiform, not unlike Philip Glass’s soundtrack work on Candyman or his collaboration with the Kronos Quartet on a fresh soundtrack for Tod Browning’s (1931) Dracula. It’s a recurring theme that imparts a bone-deep, desirable dread.
Another peak, ‘Dichotomy’, is a scorching return to broken rhythmic interjection. Few beyond Shellac, live, could pull off such sharded finesse, leaving a hairline of silence between chords before wielding another. It’s furious in design but almost ecstatic in execution.
The established, almost macabre sax and horn theme returns on ‘Provenance’; another prelude to a full-blown salvo. Like Sunn O))) at their most razing, the flow between interlude and onslaught feels like a ritual cleaving of space. Reed’s cathedral of distortion, seemingly built to collapse again and again, is as unforgiving as a black hole with a god complex. But if this destruction is born of love, it’s a love rooted not in righteousness but in marrow-deep justice. Reed offers devotional mastery in service of what should and must be: something equitable, decolonial and free. It’s refusal as ritual and sound as an act of unrelenting care.
This time around, the drums – shared here by Scarlett Shreds and Seth Cher – are crushing perfection, dragging ever so slightly behind the pulse to create a tar-thick elasticity. Summoning another Stephen O’Malley project, Burning Witch, at their best, they feel vast and deliberate. Sealing the deal, the room sound is immense, all echo and pressure. Reverberation doesn’t so much trail the sound as complete it.
And then, the voice. Five albums in, ‘Grief’ is the first time Reed has ever lent vocals to a D//D track, and it’s sublime. Her distorted voice drapes itself across a vibrating bass tone like fog over a faultline, repeating: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do / I’m so lonely without you.” It’s rapt and contorted – a Liz Harris-like invocation, submerged. At just 86 seconds, it’s the shortest track on the record but also its fulcrum. The doom-sear of ‘Holding Pattern’ doesn’t undo that moment of grief. Instead, it elevates it, setting the scene for a final reckoning. On closer ‘Death Cult’, the interplay between sax and horns resumes to intertwine like memory, sealing something final. Here, Reed speaks back to every grim prescription handed down by systems designed to erase her. “I’m Black and I’m Cherokee and get told all the time that I am predisposed to certain death and suffering,” she said recently. “I refuse to accept this as my only reality… It’s time to create new possibilities, new pathways in order for survival to happen – not just survival, but a great life.”
It’s fitting that Insatiable marks Reed’s debut on Bella Union and follows the recent premiere of her first symphony with the BBC Concert Orchestra. That work – her lifelong dream – may have been orchestral in form, but this record filters it in spirit. The sweep and clarity of intent is one thing, but the full-bodied emotional range? That’s something else. Insatiable is doom not as genre but as vessel; something wide enough to carry grief, rage, care, memory and the belief that sound can still do something. In a world that sells silence as a sick civility, it howls in the name of unquiet love.
