This morning, in my old bed, in my new room, in my new house of two weeks, I woke to the sound of a storm dwindling, a once frightening storm that apparently savaged Georgia during the night, a storm that I apparently slept straight through…but with good reason.

These past few weeks, I’ve been exhausted. I’ve just gone through a move to a brand new house, and when I haven’t been spending my nights and days settling in, I’ve been working incessantly so I can afford to enjoy my trip to New York in three weeks. So I do apologize for neglecting you all.

After breakfast, among MSNBC’s hyper-coverage of Ebola and texts from my girlfriend telling me why even reading the New York Times has yet to soothe her fears of the disease, I discovered an album with a sound terrifyingly synchronous with the current international conscious.

Pharmakon‘s Bestial Burdens, released today by Sacred Bones Records, is a powerful and relentless meditation on the pathological and the inevitable corporeal betrayal. And while listeners will certainly view its significance in a wider spectrum, it’s important to remember Bestial Burdens is indeed a very personal work to Pharmakon‘s sole member, Margaret Chardiet, who wrote the album in response to an emergency surgery she underwent last year to remove a cyst that had collapsed one of her organs.

What is it about noise music that it can so accurately reflect our own feelings on mortality, though? Perhaps it’s in its discordance – its harsh static and unabating high frequencies drilling to our very core and mining our most primal fears of death, danger, illness, etc. Or perhaps it’s in the hypnotic qualities of its repetitiveness – lulling us into comfort, leading us to meditate on what truly matters in life, if anything at all.

Last year, The Haxan Cloak‘s Excavation captivated with its immense and haunting aural depiction of what may await the mind and soul after the body dies. This year, Pharmakon provides a means to such an end.

The album opens with Chardiet hyperventilating and continues into a claustrophobic realm of panic and treachery. We’re trapped within ourselves, immobile, mute, and questioning everything.

It’s a frightening and uncomfortable listen, to be sure. Head bobbing is replaced with wide eyed paranoia. Your heart thumps nervously along to the beats. You begin to doubt the very blood that flows through your veins. Chardiet’s screams and shouts like nothing is going to be okay. You want to stay inside, alone in your bed, quarantined. It’s eerie how conveniently this has been released during a time when words like “plague” and “epidemic” are back in the national lexicon.

Each track maintains the grisly tone of the album while still managing to remain surprising in their own respect. “Primitive Struggle” is perhaps the most unsettling track on the album with its sample of a man violently retching and struggling to breathe while Chardiet acts like the Grim Reaper standing nearby beating a deep and heavily distorted bass drum, menacing and anticipating.

Bestial Burdens is horrific in its masterfully composed atmosphere, and is an album worth marveling for that very reason. Pharmakon is a name destined to remain on the tip of my tongue through the end of the year.