Released on Halloween 2025, NORD Compendium by Burial Grid is a collection of songs about rare diseases, disorders, and illnesses that affect a small but significant proportion of the population. The album features disfigured and demonic vocals, textures of the body failing, and fluid and abstract songwriting, all cast in an electric, deteriorating and horror industrial soundscape. The album marks a new direction for the artist sonically, conceptually, and lyrically.
The cover art showcases a conglomeration of the gruesome physical realities of rare diseases. I asked Adam Kozak – the artist that is Burial Grid – about the idea guiding the cover art done by Alex Eckman-Lawn, one of his favorite visual artists. He said, “I didn’t want anything to be tactful or subtle about the artwork, as that would conceal an album that sounds, at least I think, pretty appalling. I generally love subtlety. But I wanted this to be a hammer to the face. A clarion call for the sake of anyone who’s living with a physical condition that makes living mindfully a near-impossibility but still persevering through a society that ignores or misunderstands them.”
The album was inspired by a short story Adam was working on about “a completely nondescript protagonist/nobody who would awake every morning with a different physical affliction. The diseases would become increasingly outlandish and horrifying and served as a lava floor for them to navigate in silence as they went about their life.” Adam added, “I liked exploring it lyrically and sonically more than as a short story.”
All songs on NORD Compendium are named for rare diseases, and the sound is like a soundtrack to the body becoming physically disfigured, destroying itself, and losing the capacity to function normally. The album opens with “Sirenomelia Sequence”, named for a rare malformation where a child’s lower limbs are fused and appear like that of a mermaid. The song features percussion that sounds like a failing heart and pattering that sounds like rats who have grown tired of digging for food. As the song progresses, it elicits a feeling of crumbling, collapsing in ruin, but there is also a noticeable feeling of serenity and grace in the closing synths.
Next is “Xeroderma Pigmentosum”, a genetic disorder that causes severe sun damage and blistering, a song that is dominated by a ballooning infectious rhythmic groove, wheezing sounds, and fizzing textures that might be construed as the sound of the skin being eaten by the sun.
After that is “Dejerine-Roussy”, named for a condition characterized by severe pain driven by damage to a part of the brain called the thalamus, which features growling vocals, expansive percussion, and melodies that play like an insane clown hammering a xylophone made of nerve fibers.
The next song is “Dracunculiasis”, a condition caused by a parasite ingested from drinking contaminated water. The parasite creates a blister from which a female worm emerges. The song showcases the graphic lyrical nature of NORD Compendium, which seems to take a grotesque first-person perspective on living with rare diseases. Adam said, “When I sat down to work on the lyrics, they were mostly all written in the same day and flowed out almost as a stream-of-consciousness. When I went back months later to begin working on the vocals I noticed that every single one of the tracks, while initially about some sort of terrible physical condition, worked as metaphors or stand-ins for other ideas. Politically, personally, or philosophically.”
The sonic textures on NORD Compendium match the graphic nature of the lyricism. Adam told me the sound “was massively influenced by the language of 80s and 90s industrial music that I grew up on, and then some of the more impressionistic avant garde work that I got into during my pretentious 20s. My biggest fears have largely been about the body breaking down in chaotic, helpless ways. The palette of Skinny Puppy’s mangled radio sampling, Laurie Anderson’s detached vocoding, and the layers of punishing sound in early Jim Thirlwell albums were a huge starting point when it came to communicating how a body in ruin feels. Especially the idea of suffering through it in silence, as many diseases are quite invisible from the outside. A good friend of mine told me that the album sounded like the inside of someone’s body as it was failing, without knowing what the album was about. That is pretty much what I was going for.”
The album begins to grow darker with “Psuedomyxoma Peritonei”, named for a slow growing cancer in the abdominal cavity. The song features an abstract soundscape and plays like a possessed tube television, including otherworldly sounds, battering, gritty textured beats, followed by “Imperforate Anus”, a birth defect in which the anus is blocked, which has an aggressive pulsating quality and hammering percussion.
The album begins its descent with “Cancrum Oris”, a disease of the mouth that results in tissue destruction, which is chaotic, diabolical, churning, and features a grim melody and atmosphere, followed by “Goodpasture Syndrome”, a disorder that attacks the lungs and kidneys, resulting in coughing blood and blood in the urine, which includes fizzing sounds like that of the physical ailments of the condition, smacking beats, and the sound of mechanically breaking down.
The album closes with “Cerebromedullospinal Disconnection”, a condition in which the brain stem becomes disconnected from the spinal cord, causing complete paralysis except for eye movements. The soundscape is completely isolating, desolate, and barren. Imagine a world in which you are trapped in the body, unable to move, that’s the feeling the song elicits.
NORD Compendium is graphic lyrically and sonically. Listening is a dark and disruptive sonic adventure but can also be an exercise in empathy for those who suffer some of the most unbearable human conditions and do so on the fringes of a society that largely ignores and misunderstands them.