In the spirit of renewal, Pharmakon has announced a new album for the new year. It’s called Contact , it’s out through Sacred Bones, and it hits store shelves both physical and digital on March 31. If you choose not to embrace the impending doom, you can also pre-order the album through Pharmakon’s Bandcamp page.

Here’s part of Margaret Chardiet’s characteristically metaphysical statement on the record:

The nature of existence and our sentience is chance, owing nothing to anything. Humankind is of no special significance to the universe. (Despite all our scrambling rejections, we cannot transcend all of our instincts — just animals, lost in a confused dream, where mankind is real and at the center of everything). We are each nothing but a single, short-lived cell in a vast organism which itself will one day die. If we accept that the only true claim sentience gives us is our tiny sliver of time, it opens us to revel in it, to make CONTACT … The moments of connection/communion/CONTACT, when the veil is for a brief but glorious moment lifted, and we are free. Empathy! EMPATHY, NOW!

Chardiet has also shared the first track from the record, “Transmission.” Listen to it and review the Contact tracklisting below.

2017 marks a decade of Chardiet working under the Pharmakon name. Her last album with the project, Bestial Burden , was released in 2014.

Contact tracklisting:

01. Nakedness of Need

02. Sentient

03. Transmission

04. Sleepwalking Form

05. Somatic

06. No Natural Order