ernia

Grind For Your Mind: Ernia's "Heroes of Withdrawal"

ernia

Ernia’s infusion of nu-metal and hardcore-informed midtempo grooves, bass-laden breakdowns, and chaotic mathcore time and tempo shifts into a riveting grind base is plenty zeitgeisty here in the tail-end of 2018. Consider the fact that the Spanish quintet wrote the songs on their self-titled debut between 2013 and 2015, and the record’s trendiness becomes downright prescient. We’ve got “Heroes of Withdrawal” streaming below in an exclusive premiere:

Clocking in at three-and-a-half minutes, “Heroes of Withdrawal” is the album’s meatiest track by nearly a full minute. Ernia make the most of this additional time as they usher the listener through a full tasting menu of movements, each course arriving before the previous has barely been touched. The band are ever-insatiable, bounding from one passage to the next in the throes of their unbridled fury while taking pains throughout to craft sensible and mature transitions. This approach promulgates upwards to the album’s structure as a whole, each song flowing into the next with many blurred lines between. The opening squeal of “Heroes of Withdrawal” is in fact the final throes of the previous track “Random Discordant Actions,” truncated by Gabriel Valcázar’s assertive initial drum salvo.

Valcázar continues into “Heroes of Withdrawal” with a shimmering cymbal-filled groove, over which Omar I. Sánchez rages with earnest howls before bassist Adrián Ruiz drops in with urgent low-end throbs. As the twin guitars enter the fray, Valcázar gradually ratchets up the intensity until finally, after a series of unison stabs, the band reach the peak blast levels that characterize so much of the album. Guitarists Daniel Espinosa and Daniel Valcázar are engaged in a constant game of tag with one another, and as each is respectively panned to the right and left audio channels, the overall result is as dizzying as it is robust. It’s minor touches like this, each member sensitive to what the others are trying to achieve, that make this record such an enthralling release.

Ernia releases on December 7th. Pre-orders are open now on Bandcamp.