This week, in our Cassette Made in Portugal column, we turn the volume all the way up for Madmess.

    Some bands write songs but Madmess build ecosystems and we love it.

    On Portugal’s rock map, the Porto trio occupy territory of their own, too heavy for comfort-psych and too unruly for orthodox stoner. What they do isn’t revivalism; it’s controlled combustion. There’s a permanent tension between instinct and ritual, between architecture and collapse. Each track feels engineered to hold fast until, at the precise moment, it chooses to detonate.

    Their sound is alchemical. Riffs land thick and tectonic. The bass doesn’t follow so much as drag the ground out from under you. The drums don’t simply keep time, they shove it forward, as if the red line has already been crossed. These are songs that cradle and crush in equal measure, protective in form yet ruthless when the jam demands oxygen. Structure splinters, groove expands, and something both sacred and grotesque flickers into view, as though a pagan forest in the north of the country had learned to plug into a wall of amplifiers.

    The lineage is audible, but never paraded. You can sense the expansive poise of Supertramp, the mythic physicality of Led Zeppelin, the existential heft of Black Sabbath and the cosmic drift of Pink Floyd in the air. But Madmess don’t quote, they metabolise. The past is raw material, not a destination.

    From their debut, Rebirth, it was clear they had little interest in tidy singles. It played less like a collection of tracks and more like a manifesto, the sound of a band already fully formed and entirely self-assured.
With The Third Coming, that identity hardened into a signature. Thirty-six minutes of modern psychedelia where the riff is both bread and sacrament. “Velvet Nebuta” and “Hazy Morning” hinted at a more laid-back conversation with classic rock, while “Sauerkraut” locked into a motorik pulse and “Widowmaker” carried the kind of percussive thump that recalls the brute swing of John Bonham. They push at their own borders, but never turn chameleonic. It always sounds unmistakably like them.

    The latest album, released in May 2025, doesn’t reinvent their wheel so much as set it ablaze again. It is tighter, more dynamically aware, more adept at balancing restraint with eruption. The rawness remains, but there’s a quiet compositional maturity in the way tension is accumulated and released. It’s not a stylistic rupture. It’s consolidation of a universe.

    On stage, the theory becomes physical fact. Madmess do not merely perform; they invoke. Volume turns tangible, repetition bends the sense of time, and groove settles into something close to collective trance. The body understands before the mind catches up. This isn’t spectacle. It’s immersion.

    In a musical climate addicted to speed and disposability, Madmess insist on duration, density and surrender. They demand time from the listener and repay it with catharsis. The scars are already there, worn openly and without apology. Proof of volume pushed to its limits, and of an unshakeable belief that rock music can still be expansive, dangerous and transformative.