Fantômas: 30 Tracks, 42 Minutes, Zero Songs—What Happens When a Supergroup Abandons Every Rule?

What happens when you assemble some of the most talented musicians in heavy music and tell them to make an album? Usually, you get a supergroup record—polished, predictable, safely weird. But what if those musicians decide to throw out every single rule about what an album is supposed to do? What if they pack 30 tracks into 42 minutes and refuse to let any of them breathe long enough to become actual songs?

Welcome to Fantômas’ 1999 self-titled debut. It’s musical Dadaism pressed onto vinyl, and honestly? It’s like trying to eat tinfoil.

A Lineup That Should’ve Been Unstoppable

Look at who’s in this band. Mike Patton from Faith No More—the guy who can contort his voice into sounds you didn’t know humans could make. Buzz Osborne from Melvins, bringing that sludgy, doomy guitar work that’s heavy enough to crack pavement. Dave Lombardo on drums, the Slayer legend who basically defined what modern metal percussion sounds like. Trevor Dunn on bass, who’s played with avant-garde genius John Zorn and lived to tell about it.

You see that lineup and you think: okay, this is going to be insane in the best way possible. Heavy, experimental, challenging—but still fundamentally a rock album. Something you can grab onto and experience.

And then you actually listen to it.

The Math Alone Is Wild

Thirty tracks. Forty-two minutes. Do that math real quick. You know what that means? Most of these “songs”—can we even call them that?—barely make it past a minute. Some are thirty seconds long. One track is literally four seconds. Why? Because it’s track 13, and the band thought 13 was unlucky, so they just included leftover noise from the previous page.

Yeah, you read that right. Pages. Not songs. The band calls them pages, like you’re flipping through a comic book. Which, honestly, is the first clue about what you’re actually dealing with here.

The longest tracks might stretch to four or five minutes, but those are the exception. Everything else comes at you in these intense, fractured bursts that vanish before you can process what just happened. It’s structurally unlike anything you’ve probably experienced as a rock album—and that’s completely intentional.

It Sounds Like a Soundtrack to Something You Can’t See

Here’s what’s wild: Fantômas built this entire album around science fiction comic books from the ‘50s and ‘70s. The campy, weird, pulpy stuff. And they never explain it directly, but somehow you figure it out anyway just by listening. That’s actually kind of genius, right? The sound itself communicates the concept without anyone holding your hand through it.

You hear these fleeting moments that sound like vintage sci-fi. Like if someone was scoring a B-movie from 1952 but replacing the theremin with extreme metal. Patton isn’t singing—he’s creating characters with his voice. Grunts, gibberish, vocal sound effects. Imagine Captain Caveman wandering through a cosmic horror story and you’re getting close.

The music itself? Doomy Melvins-style riffs that show up for five seconds and then disappear. Lombardo’s drums shift time signatures without warning, like someone’s jamming a film reel in the projector. Trevor Dunn’s bass anchors these brief moments of groove before everything explodes again. It’s like they’re soundtracking every panel of a comic as you flip through it. Scene change. Sound change. Turn the page. Everything resets.

And the thing is—there’s no cinematic build here. You know how some instrumental albums have this sweeping, emotional arc? Foreshadowing, callbacks, themes that develop? This album doesn’t do any of that. It’s just pure, chaotic reaction to whatever frame you’re looking at. Except, again, you can’t actually see the frames.

Okay, let’s be fair. There’s something genuinely refreshing about music this uncooperative. In 2025, when AI can probably spit out a “pretty good” rock song in thirty seconds, Fantômas feels almost rebellious. There’s no way an algorithm makes this. It’s too random, too human, too rooted in four musicians reacting to each other in real time with zero concern for what anyone wants.

The musicianship is absolutely bonkers, too. How do you even remember how to play this stuff? The first page alone is a minute and thirty-five seconds of complete chaos, and somehow these four people can reproduce it. The precision required just to hold this together is mind-blowing. These aren’t amateurs messing around. These are monsters using their elite-level skills to actively work against your comfort.

And conceptually? If you’re into music as art—as ideas rather than just listening experiences—there’s something admirable here. The commitment to a vision, the refusal to compromise even a little bit, the sheer audacity of releasing something this hostile to casual enjoyment. That takes guts. That guitar tone sounds like a chainsaw wrapped in velvet for five seconds, then it’s gone. That bass line sounds like something out of Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” intro, then it evaporates. Cool riff, bro. Too bad you’ll never hear it again.

You can also hear how this influenced the extreme metal that came after it. Slipknot’s persona-driven chaos? Mastodon’s proggy, unpredictable heaviness? The Locust and those other grindcore weirdos? Yeah, Fantômas is in their DNA somewhere. Mike Patton basically created a template for how to be aggressively experimental while still technically being a rock band.

How Do You Actually Listen to This?

Here’s where we need to get honest. You can’t listen to this passively. Like, at all. Put this on while you’re working and it will absolutely startle the hell out of you. Quiet scraping noises suddenly become full-band detonations. Calm sections last maybe ten seconds before something jarring happens. This is the opposite of background music. It’s actively hostile to it.

So you try active listening instead. You sit down, give it your full attention, really try to engage. And you know what happens? The moment something starts to develop—the moment you think “oh, this riff is interesting” or “this groove is cool”—they kill it. They just stop and move somewhere completely different. It’s frustrating in a way that’s hard to describe. Like watching someone build something intricate, then smash it before it’s finished. Over and over. For forty-two minutes.

And without the actual comic book—without whatever visual component this was apparently designed to accompany—you’re basically listening to the soundtrack of a grindhouse horror movie with no movie to watch. Why would you do that? What’s the context? Where’s the payoff?

Look, every music fan reaches a ceiling at some point. You can be wildly adventurous, you can push your boundaries constantly, and there will still be stuff that just doesn’t click. Not because it’s “bad,” but because it’s fundamentally outside what your brain wants from a listening experience.

You can expand your taste horizontally—jazz, classical, electronic, world music, whatever. That’s growing as a listener. But this is different. This asks you to fundamentally redefine what “enjoying music” even means. And for a lot of people, that’s just not where they’re at. Maybe you did 30 years of heavy, weird rock music already. Maybe you’re branching out in different directions now. And yeah, this is avant-garde and experimental, but it’s still fundamentally in the rock/metal zone, just taken to an extreme that stops feeling like music at all.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s just honesty. Some people will love this—genuinely, deeply love it. But those people are probably already neck-deep in Mike Patton’s entire universe. They’re comfortable with extreme experimentation. They find being disoriented fun. The shock and confusion are features, not bugs. For everyone else? This is the ceiling. This is where you tap out.

Fantômas’ debut matters, even if you’ll never listen to it again. It shows how far a supergroup can push things before it stops being recognizable as rock music. It proves that commercial success isn’t the only measure of artistic achievement. And it demonstrates how one singer’s relentless experimentation can influence an entire generation of extreme artists who came after.

But honestly? This feels perfect for something very specific that most of us aren’t doing. Maybe it’s perfect for a live show where the volume and spectacle turn chaos into communal experience. Maybe it’s perfect for someone actively studying experimental music. Maybe—and let’s just say it—it’s perfect for whatever mind-altering substance enhances this kind of sensory assault.

If this was 10 songs at normal length, it might be an awesome grindcore/avant-garde metal album. But it’s not. It’s 30 fragments that refuse to cohere, and that makes it more of a curiosity than a listen. You grab one page—maybe that four-minute Page 4, maybe the five-minute Page 18—and you basically get the whole idea. “Here’s what this sounds like. Imagine 42 minutes of that. If it speaks to you, go deeper. If not, at least you tried.”

And you know what? That’s okay. Being a passionate music fan doesn’t mean you have to “get” everything experimental. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is: I respect what you’re doing, I understand why it matters, and I’m just not the audience for it.

It’s like trying to eat tinfoil, you know? Your brain knows it’s not meant for consumption. But maybe somewhere out there, someone’s got the stomach for it.

Songs in this Episode

• Intro - Book 1: Page 1

• 12:12 - Book 1: Page 4

• 16:42 - Book 1: Page 17

• 21:12 - Book 1: Page 7

• Outro - Book 1: Page 30

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