The Oakdale Asylum

With pulse-quickening tempos mixed with cold electronics, a wall of distorted guitars, and placed over a layer of blast beats, The Oakdale Asylum offers the listener a unique, aggressive sonic experience. The band’s music consists of a mix of Grindcore, Death Metal, Techno, and Industrial flavors that are not so much blended as much as chopped haphazardly and sewn together into a twisted antithesis of what “normal” music should sound like.

The Oakdale Asylum takes its name from the Oakdale Regional Center for Developmental Disabilities, a home for the mentally impaired that used to operate in the band’s hometown of Lapeer, Mi. The band is led by multi-instrumentalist Dean Henderson Jr, who programs drums and synth along with playing bass, guitar, and vocals. The Oakdale Asylum draws influence from such acts as Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Repulsion, Carcass, Napalm Death, Exhumed, Front Line Assembly, and Dying Fetus to name a few.

The band’s songs range in topic from politics to science fiction, horror, and the challenges of basic life. Although the song structures are based on Grindcore stylings, the songs are stretched out much longer than normal Grindcore tracks in order to explore the potential of each offering. The band prefers to deviate from the normal, bland template of “verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus, end” and tends to piece together each song based on the current feeling. It is not unusual for an Oakdale Asylum song to have mismatched verses, choruses, and bridges placed in sometimes seemingly random places.

The band has released one album entitled, Drain the Swamp. The album was recorded during the Covid-19 pandemic and is presented in chronological order by topic as a concept album of 2020. All recording and engineering were done “in house” by Dean Henderson as well as all of the album’s artwork. Currently, the band is writing and recording a follow-up to Drain the Swamp and is expected to be released in late 2021 or early 2022.

The Oakdale Asylum’s tracks

• Stochastic Terrorism by The Oakdale Asylum
• The Cynic by The Oakdale Asylum
• Stable Genius by The Oakdale Asylum
• Broken Toys by The Oakdale Asylum
• Disinformation Wars by The Oakdale Asylum
• Dead Man Walking by The Oakdale Asylum
• Elon's Ark by The Oakdale Asylum
• The Simulation by The Oakdale Asylum
• Sever the Nerve by The Oakdale Asylum
• Symbiote by The Oakdale Asylum