Shade — The Exploitation Tapes Review
Shade is a Tunisian alternative/stoner rock entity, blending heavy groove with hazy, desert-toned atmosphere. The band released their latest EP, The Exploitation Tapes, on 23 January 2026 — an independent release that captures their thick riff-driven character in a concise, hard-hitting format.
Shade, The Exploitation Tapes Review: This review will evaluate every aspect of the album, from its intricate musical composition to its production.
The First Three Sins, The Summary
The First Sin, The Strings/Keys: Guitars cycle with trance-like insistence as rhythms lock into physical momentum. The Second Sin, The Vocals: The vocals shift in tone and delivery, moving between grit, attitude, and theatrical bite. The Third Sin, The Percussions: The drums adapt to each hymn, from steady industrial pulse to stomping rock swagger and frantic bursts.
The Fourth Sin, Overall Discussion
Midnight Weight & Cinematic Tension
Before the music even begins, Shade emerge as a riff-driven force where weight and atmosphere exist in constant tension. Drawing from alternative rock, stoner, and metal, their sound moves through heavy, hypnotic grooves, cinematic textures, genre-fluid aggression, and sudden dynamic shifts.
B-Movie Reels & VHS Violence
Every song tells a story like a midnight movie. Each hymn is a new reel of B-movie energy: factory revolts, haunted highways, killer dance shows, swamp sirens, and demonic beavers.
As each hymn is relatively distinct, I thought it was better to approach this article from a different angle. As soon as you hit play, the self-titled opening hymn greets you with a Danzig-bluesy, doom-fuzz haze. It feels like a lost Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt transmission, building a narrative tension that warns you exactly what’s coming next.
Factory Revolt & Haunted Highways
Following suit, the second hymn, S.G.K., arrives with dirty, mid-gain stoner-metal riffing and a relentless mechanical pulse. The drums lock into a steady, industrial groove, heavy on the toms, laying a foundation for vocals poised between a gritty shout and a rhythmic chant.
It’s the sound of a factory revolt—forceful, disciplined, and inevitable.
The third hymn, Surge, is designed to cut through thick fog. The guitars pivot to driving, highway-motion riffs, using tremolo and reverb to bleed night road atmosphere into the mix. Propulsive, ride-heavy drum beats provide the momentum of a high-speed pursuit, while the vocals shift into an urgent, breath-forward phrasing.
It feels like the score to a supernatural road-chase: neon signs flickering in the distance while something unnatural gains on you in the rear-view mirror.
Bloodbath Boogie: Neon, Gristle & Glamour
Bloodbath Boogie takes the record to the dance floor—one soaked in neon and gristle. The drums lean into disco-adjacent patterns, twisted into a heavy rock stomp, while the guitars provide swaggering, boogie-woogie riffs dripping with wah-pedal sleaze. The vocals take a theatrical turn, landing somewhere between playful and predatory. It’s the soundtrack to a rigged 70s dance competition where the winners are crowned in glitter and the losers disappear mysteriously behind the velvet curtain.
Swamp Horror & Demonic Beavers
What the River Took drags the listener out of the club and into the mud. It’s a Mississippi blues nightmare, trading the boogie for slow, suffocating doom pacing and reverb-drenched drone. The drums are spacious and patient, leaving ambient layers of water, wind, and insects to seep into the mix. With haunting, drawn-out vocals and the ghost of a slide guitar, it’s pure swamp-horror—the sound of something ancient waiting just beneath the surface of the blackwater.
Forbidden Snack serves as the record’s wild-eyed finale. After that swampy stillness, the record suddenly snaps, closing with a fast, chaotic explosion of punk-inflected stoner riffs. The drums abandon the groove for frenetic, grind-adjacent bursts, while the vocals pivot into something truly wild and exaggerated. It’s the ultimate B-movie payoff—the moment the Demonic Beavers finally swarm. High-speed, high-stakes, and completely unhinged, it leaves you breathless as the screen goes black.
Tape-Aged Devilmanship
Shade play loud, over-the-top music that shimmers with a malevolent glow; a fever-dream soundtrack for a collection of films that never existed. Their devilmanship is nailed down, with compositions that deliver a raw, powerful sound by seamlessly bleeding alternative, stoner, and metal into one another.
Shade are not chasing a polished, modern sheen. Instead, Shade leans into a cinematic, tactile, tape-aged aesthetic that gives the record its grit and personality. It’s heavy, it’s haunted, and it’s unapologetically weird.
A Mixtape from the Late-Night Double Feature
The Exploitation Tapes plays like a mixtape rescued from the wreckage of a late-night double feature. A fruit of art—comedy, horror and heavy rock—where guitars cycle with trance-like insistence as rhythms lock into physical momentum. This is not heaviness as blunt force, but repetition, space, and pressure shaped into forward motion.
Closing Credits: Horror-Comedy with a Wink
It ends the record with a wink—the perfect closing credit roll for a fictional VHS horror‑comedy.
The Fifth Sin, The Memorabilia
For me, The Exploitation Tapes is a cycle of life and death that keeps larking over my replay button. While I find joy in the likes of Sleep, Danzig, or Electric Wizard, Shade gives me something entirely different—a dirty, bluesy-doom and psychedelic-fuzz that feels unique and dangerously alive.
My advice? Use headphones. Headphones are the sinful way to consume this; it transforms the record into something more than a soundtrack—a horror film for the ears.
The Sixth Sin, The Artwork
The artwork—I think I get it. It looks like someone holding tickets, leaning into the theatrical horror-show theme
The Seventh Sin, Disrelish
If there is one thing to disrelish, it’s that the record is far too short. But then, that’s why the devil invented the replay button. If you dig doom, psychedelia, fuzz, blues, and horror, you’ll find yourself hitting it again and again. No disrelish—just the devil at work and pure relish.
Promotional material provided by Shade.
The Hymns
01. The Exploitation Tapes
02. S.G.K.
03. Surge
04. Bloodbath Boogie
05. What the River Took
06. Forbidden Snack
Shade
Mehdi Beltaïe — Vocals
Ahmed Ben Ayed — Guitar
Mehdi Haouet — Guitar
Aziz El Ghoul — Drums
Walter Vega — Bass