Knoll’s performance was as disfigured as it was polished, much like their latest album from this past January, As Spoken. The group balances technical grindcore with macabre overtones, evoking a communion with the spirits of the past, though these spirits are of languages and traditions–most notably those associated with funeral culture and the act of mourning–rather than of the dearly departed. They fixate on conclusions and how transient endings are, stopping not with death but with how ideas continue past one’s expiration. As Spoken takes more influence from opera, Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher’s theory of Hauntology, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, than it does zombie rituals. As such, it possesses a hallowed texture, not a horrific one.

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The group’s music reflects this precise and inhuman vision. Each riff and gargled vocal line and bleating trumpet hit their marks without room for error but with enough space to evolve. Knoll takes grindcore’s tendency to pack as many ideas into a track as possible into a more fluid space. Sections still appear and disappear unpredictably, but each is given a chance to grow past its foundations. 

The irony in all this is that Eubanks envies grindcore’s penchant to rip it and stick it. “I love it when people don’t give a fuck,” he says. Housed inside his deep interests in performance art is the punk desire to provoke audience reaction, whether that’s inciting a woman to toss her drink and evacuate the venue, obtaining ear-to-ear grins, or causing patrons to adopt the “stank-face.” Though Knoll’s performance is finely tuned, audience reception is always a surprise to Eubanks. “I adore all of them. We seek these reactions.”

In addition to his fascination with how people respond to Knoll’s music, Eubanks spoke with us about As Spoken’s concept, his vocal training, deathcore, and more.   

Does it suck ass lugging all your stage equipment around?

Dude, I’m a total bitch about it. We have antique lamps and shit and we play in front of funeral drapes and I also have a big drafting table with my electronics rig. I bring it all to Europe too. I like for us to have a show and those things make me feel good and having the same thing every day makes me feel comfortable, especially when we’re touring Europe. It’s hard, but one of the greatest joys of being in the band is taking these things with me.  

It justifies the effort because as we’ve continued to push our aesthetic direction, with the show especially, people have noticed us more. In a practical sense, it makes us more tangible and marketable. If there’s a feeling you are outright invoking that is inescapable, it leaves a lasting impression. That’s at least what I want to accomplish. 

I read that you started out as a deathcore kid and then became a Nails fan. How do you look back on those styles now that Knoll has honed its own creative identity?

I’m definitely not a deathcore fan nowadays. However, I’ll forever hold a fondness for Nails. I adore the vein of powerviolence or grindcore or whatever you want to call it that still beholds a catchiness or elements of songwriting without giving complete way to the wall of sound that I think is inherent to the genre. Nails and Todd Jones write songs, you know. They’re memorable. That band has stuck with me for a long time.

I would say, being in rudimentary schools and listening to deathcore was my first gateway into extreme harsh vocals. I wouldn’t say those styles are influential to me nowadays, but I will pay respect to the technicality some of those vocalists hold. It was a good thing for me to aspire to as a child. None of those guys were ripping their throats apart, so it was good that I got my start there. 

Now, more so, I’m looking to things that are avant-garde and taking less inspiration from conventional metal approaches and more from opera and their methods of projection and narrative conveyance within body motions, which I care about within the live aspect of Knoll. I find myself in isolation when it comes to taking inspiration from other vocalists. I think that trying to emulate other singers has not worked out well for me in the past. It’s a matter of finding your own voice and making yourself an apt conduit for your own music rather than trying to rip that from someone else because you’ll end up pushing your timbre and range into places it can’t go. 

Do you believe that idea applies more to vocalists than it does to drummers or guitarists?

Definitely so. The voice is an instrument that’s so specific to you, and I’ve found great success and fulfillment in exploring where my techniques may take me by chance. The evolution of my style within Knoll’s framework has come more from improvisation than it has from the recordings themselves. Of course, I still get compared to other freaky overtone vocalists like Travis Ryan or the guy from Lorna Shore, Will Ramos. But, to be completely honest, I don’t listen to either of those bands. I like Cattle Decap; they’re cool. Where I take most from other acts and incorporate them into my vocals, and they may have a different voice and tonality than me, are qualities like an over-pronounced enunciation that gives them a sort of prophetic quality in their delivery. Or with opera, let’s say there’s warble in their higher frequencies that gives them a ghostly quality to the resonance. So I like to take that feeling and imbue it within my harsh vocals. But I’m not singing or breaking glass. 

It’s hard to take from other vocalists because it’s a personal thing. It’s your own voice. Plus, in extreme metal, there’s not as much variance between styles.

I would agree with that. It’s very easy to fall in line with what some people may call the cookie-cutter death growl. It’s not that I’ve been ashamed of that or taking any sort of critique or heedance to being too similar to other vocalists. I agree with you that there are only so many ways someone can sound. You’ll always sound like someone else in one range or in another regard. But, I have found a lot of enjoyment and fulfillment in taking portions of my range or technique and bottoming them out, to say. There’s an absence of the traditional growl on our most recent album compared to our earlier works, where it’s been replaced by me taking the same technique I’d use for a higher frequency range and pushing it to its utmost depths. It creates what I call a blood gargle. It’s a deep crackle. 

To me, being able to do those things with my voice is about what feels the most vile and what delivery I feel is the most key for the music at that point in time. Those techniques tend to be more difficult, in terms of physicality, but more expressive. I found the act of the traditional growl isn’t so intensive on the lungs. You don’t really feel it. You’re just blowing air. Whereas I feel a deep bodily sensation with just about every other technique I may employ within music. 

Do your body motions tie into the negative emotions you try to express that feel so natural to you? 

Absolutely. I’m a big fan of macabre opera. I feel like a lot of my time, especially with what influences me artistically, musically, or vocally, is spent within old films or opera or extreme performances and performance art. Knoll is largely an impersonal entity. I would not liken the majority of its lyricism to that of speaking. It’s an act of further conviction. I think it requires an extreme timbre and a dramatic mode of expression, so I find a connection to harsh vocals within that. Of course, I do plenty of experimentation that I wouldn’t put within the conventional walks of harsh vocals: asphyxiation, strangulation, whispering, and hoarseness. I’m not against singing or more conventional vocal expressions; I just haven’t found a home within them that conveys the negativity of Knoll’s music. 

When it comes to bodily expressions and whatnot, there are certain positions and bodily convulsions that performing this sort of art forces you into. Within the live scenario, I unfortunately find myself writing parts where I am performing or exhaling for the entirety of the music, even if it’s a minute long, there’s hardly room to breathe. The pressure that puts on your physical being is immense. So, something that’s frequently employed within the live shows. 

There was one point in particular where I was horrifyingly confronted with that reality when we were performing live in California, and this was when I never performed with shoes or a shirt. A lady approached me after the show and told me that she watched my feet for the majority of the set and noticed that my toes were curling every time I vocalized. After that, I’ve been unusually hyperaware of my bodily mechanisms when doing this sort of this. But, it speaks to where I am with this music and performance. 

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You’re always perceiving how you’re being perceived?

I’ve distanced myself from it somewhat. Knoll being impersonal has detached me from the body and I find solace in being ignorant of my anatomy both when creating and when performing the music. It’s not to be so pretentious to say that I don’t think of myself as a human being, but it’s an effort towards becoming ignorant of that and escaping it. 

It’s depersonalization, which is reflected in many physical acts. For example, marathon runners forget the human part of themselves because they’re so focused on the physicality of the act.

I like the marathon analogy. I can somewhat relate to a runner’s high. There is a euphoria in writing songs this way, so even if there aren’t hands around my neck, it feels like I’m being strangled by the sheer lack of breath and what I’m putting myself through. I receive a lot of questions at the merch table about how I can speak after a set. I always answer that it’s not the throat aspect that is difficult but the cardiovascular aspect. I’m not worried about the voice. I’m trying not to pass out the entire time. To tell you the truth, my vocal styles aren’t particularly difficult. I feel relaxed in the chest and head and voice when I’m performing. But trying to stay afloat and awake is the difficult part. 

It’s crazy how much physical fitness can play into performances. 

Absolutely. I went through a vigorous experience on our last tour, which was an amazing tour of North America, but I find myself, on whatever tour we do, getting sick at least once. I got violently ill in the southern Californian stretch. On the last tour, there ended up being 5 days in succession where I vomited profusely following Knoll’s set. 

In a funny metaphorical sense, it’s fitting. I’m there mentally, but achieving that physically was terrible. I have a memory after playing San Diego where I had to rush off the stage and vomit beside our band immediately.

I don’t know what it is. I think it’s along the lines of losing bodily awareness when doing this sort of thing. There are some portions of the music where I gag myself into the microphone to do a horse whisper. That happened in Toronto. There was a foam emerging from my mouth. We closed with “Portrait,” which contains a climax that begins with vocals. Prior to that, I asphyxiated myself with a hawking motion. I don’t know how you’re going to include that (writer’s note: ). Sometimes it’s involuntary, sometimes it’s provoked. But yeah, there’s a loss of bodily awareness.  

I feel a deep sense of foreboding before we go on, but the doom and dread exit when I begin my portion of the performance. It’s replaced by terror and power. I feel a sense of perpetual unease when performing, but it’s less anxiety and more driving. 

A statement I wanted to ask about comes from As Spoken’s liner notes. “…a lecture of dilapidated language & its propensity to become riddled with sickness when kept.” It’s beautifully written, but I wanted you to expand on it. I thought it was about how the sins of the past will manifest through our language if we don’t examine how we use our language. 

I think it can be interpreted in many ways. Language as a mode of communication is largely bereft of the confine of words. Again, I think language is all modes of communication. As Spoken draws a metaphor to communication within speaking but there are bodily arts and visual arts of communication, and I think that message as a whole can be viewed as a wicked game of telephone. I think human nature has a tendency to corrupt itself, and its most powerful medium of doing so is with misdirection. I think much of that is held within language. 

As Spoken resides at the end of this timepiece and this timeline. As you said, it’s an examination and a rumination on where these things where eventually settle and lie. I find a lot of power within this misdirection. There’s a manifestation of it on As Spoken within wordplay and whatnot. I wouldn’t say my lyrical constituents are lying to you, but there are double entendres and many meanings. 

It’s written in a way where you can’t take it as is.

Definitely. I think that Knoll’s conceptuals and meanings provoke a very tangible element of verbosity. It is very difficult to convey these ideas, for me, within a shorter time span in music and even with speaking, I find myself deeply desiring to expand Knoll’s expression of art. Many of the tracks have short film accompaniments and a slew of graphics and arts associated with them. I would be at a total loss to convey these things without more tools at my disposal. So it’s an utmost regurgitation of these things into every medium I can get my hands onto. I think, for that reason, it has become somewhat inescapable and suffocating. Some people are turned off by the idea, but for those willing to receive that idea, there is much to be received. 

Knoll’s lyrics language and the language with which you operate, from your music to your visuals to your performance, is an alternative to conventional forms. 

Sure. I would say it’s somewhat of an homage to a lost period of art. I think of post-industrialization and the loss of emphasis on mourning culture–which is the namesake of Knoll, of relating to a funeral toll, an archaic one, at that. I find myself looking to older artists not because they’re old or because I’m paying respect to older art, but as mourning itself to what I view as a lost period of artistic expression and integrity. I find myself deeply saddened by the cheapening of visual and musical artistic mediums and the loss of artistic notions and expression within objects common to the common man, or belonged to the common man. 

Knoll is an utmost cling to expression. Everything must be to the finest nuance, I think it can be too much for some people, and I completely understand that. But it is intentionally of dramatics and somewhat ridiculous and an acceptance of that and an embrace of things that are macabre to the utmost.

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As Spoken is available now.

Released through Transcending Obscurity this past January, Cerebral Purgatory is tight and technical grindcore cut from a different cloth. Resin Tomb propounds that there needs to be plenty of death metal in your grindcore, it better sound more like Ulcerate than Morbid Angel, and while you’re at it, throw some sludge in there, but not enough to draw the songs out longer than four minutes and twenty seconds. 

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Even with all these strata, Resin Tomb is rooted in grindcore. The band’s backstory and live shows best display their hardcore origins, as seen from their movements and demeanor captured on video. When asked if they were raised on Gorguts riffs and transitioned into hardcore enthusiasts when they could legally drink, vocalist Matt Budge replied: “Sort of the other way around, honestly. We are all hardcore kids at heart, AA Shows were big back in the day, so we were all fortunate enough to go to lots of shows from the ages of 15 onwards.”

These roots stuck with them as their tastes matured and they dove into grindcore, “post-black metal Danish/Belgian bands, and finally into death metal and everything dissonant.” They didn’t comb through these styles but ingested them deeply enough that, when Resin Tomb assumed form, they felt it imperative to incorporate all their heavy tastes. Many of these influences are evident even on first listens but, when asked about other influences that may be harder to spot, guitarist Brendan Pip mentioned, “David Bowie, Mobb Deep, Lord Mantis, Disentomb, and Tears for Fears.” He did not expand on how Resin Tomb interpreted these acts, which only means that there’s more buried treasure to dig for.

What will grab your attention first is the bass, which is placed directly in the center of the mix and plays a vital role on Cerebral Purgatory. Pip says, “A lot of the guitar riffs are only held together by single string notes in some parts so the bass being right in your face with the drums helps fill the space between notes and adds a level of dynamics to sections without taking away any power.” 

He was kind enough to explain how they achieved their version of Kurt Ballou’s bass blending techniques. “We recorded everything on a fender jazz bass and re-Amped, it through a 6505 into an orange 4×12 with a BK7 darkglass and then blended it with the DI track in ProTools. I think in the end, the bass comprised of four different layers, including a room mic on the reamp. So the orange guitar cab reamp version became the mid-range crunch that you hear present with the guitars in the final recording. By splitting the signal we don’t lose any of the clean low end from too much distortion.”

The bass’ sheer muscle contributes to Cerebral Purgatory’s expression, itself an enraged outpouring towards the fruitlessness of our lives. As Budge explains, “Every song on Cerebral Purgatory is about a horrible existence or a terrifying death. As you said, it’s a morbid fascination with the futility of man. It’s like going onto ‘LiveLeak’ (RIP), it’s not just to shock yourself with gore-related content, it’s a brutal reminder of how fragile life can be. You can be doing a mundane task, like driving to work, and you have a lapse in judgment and suddenly your life is over. It’s not done in a way to revere how horrible these moments are, but more so to bring to the forefront that life is disposable and that’s absolutely terrifying.”

Resin Tomb wants you to know that “life is cheap, everything can change at any time, and that real life is far scarier than any fictional concept.” This horror emanates from the fact that every track except for “Human Confetti,” a detached look at what being electrically evaporated would feel like, is based on a real story. “Purge Fluid” recounts Hisashi Ouchi’s story of receiving the worst radiation burns in history after an accident at a Japanese power plant in 1999. He lived for an additional 83 days, but lost most of his flesh and ended up crying literal blood. Resin Tomb withdraws such details and focuses on the horrific aftermath—Ouchi was kept alive on machines to be studied. The tracks’s lyrics are equally as bleak:

“A scientific oddity/ Omitting humility/ Degraded, they study me/ Machines and tubes are my lifeblood/ A body used to explore/ Leaking flesh, auto immune/ Exacerbated deterioration”

It goes without saying that this music is dismal—which is where Resin Tomb’s hardcore roots come back in. Cerebral Purgatory is not happy music, it’s meant to energize you to create meaning in your life because there truly is none, and the universe, the environment, and occasionally, even our fellow man do not care for us. 

However, if there is one smirk to be found on Cerebral Purgatory, it comes through the group’s meticulousness. Resin Tomb is a weed reference, and rather than stopping there, they made half of the album’s tracks run for 4 minutes and 20 seconds. “When those songs were coming in close to that time frame, our guitarist Brendan made them all that length with samples etc. These samples are placed for the flow of the album, he just purposely made them all lengths that fit that time frame as a little nod to 4/20.” If even a strand of human confetti can find the humor in a situation like that, maybe we should all adopt Resin Tomb’s outlook. 

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Cerebral Purgatory is out now via Transcending Obscurity.

The statement shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but Jocke Lindström’s delivery enriches it. Admittedly, “Shitegeist” is closer to punk rock than it is outright grind, which is to say that you can understand what Child are playing on first listen rather than succumb to the breakneck tempos. Those are reserved for later tracks on Shitegeist. In all honesty, “Shitegeist” is simple, but the pieces at work here–Lindström’s performance, the crunchy texture, and Albin Sköld’s performance behind the drumkit in which he operates at a few clicks faster than the rest of the troupe–shine because of it. Listen to it now and enjoy Child at their most legible before all hell breaks loose when they release Shitegeist on March 29 through Suicide Records.

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The band comments:

We are heading fast into the new dark ages. Man-made destruction of society, of ecosystems, of the world as we know it. We ignore all warnings, as long as we can grow our wealth. The world leaders create chasms in society. Terror, hatred, war is the result of their polarisation. We are heading fast for annihilation… And maybe that’s for the best. Everything sucks. Everything’s fucked.

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Preorder Shitegeist here.

“No Closure” is the final track on the album. We slowed things down a bit for this track and went for a sludgier and heavier approach, which we feel is important to do from time to time in order to make the overall album a bit more dynamic. Rest assured that the majority of songs are packed with plenty of blastbeats and ferocity, as keeping things at a high BPM is necessity for us, but this is the one that just hits you over the head a few times with a heavy blunt rudimentary object. 

Lyrically it’s about regret. It’s pretty self explanatory. No fucking closure!

Make sure to give this accelerated aggression of an LP a spin in a week’s time, and for now, have a listen to a concentrated and pained final assault on the senses.

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Preorder The Dismal Advance here.

But do we want this to happen? Late-stage capitalism has a knack for subsuming and diluting all forms of “alternative” culture in a desperate attempt to continue its flagging growth. Hell, is such a crossover even possible? Grindcore is what it is because of its unpalatability, its pure fucking whiplash intensity. This horrible music is ours—stay away, tastemaking goons. Still, you can’t help but feel like something’s brewing. Internet music culture is wild, ever-increasingly so. In this strange cultural space, grind has room to develop, and some unexpected crossover in the near to medium-term future is not impossible to envisage.

For now, let’s have a look at the best releases in the genre from the last six months. We’ve already looked at Q1 and Q2; now we’re combining the final two quarters for a bumper rundown. This list attempts to encompass the many faces of grind, from the studious to the silly, the sublime to the ridiculous. It also features at least two releases that, though they will likely be deeply unpopular with purists, point in a direction towards the grind’s genre-melding digital future. Hold on tight.

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Chepang – Swatta

July 7, GURKHA COMMANDO BLAST TEAM

Chepang epitomize everything great about grindcore. Styling themselves as “immigrindcore,” the collective originally hail from Kathmandu, Nepal, but now call New York their home. Outraged at the endless political turmoil of their homeland, the raw but dynamic grind of their latest full-length Swatta is a means of expressing anger, but also as a vessel to deliver future-conscious hope, epitomized by the intense beauty of tracks like “Anumati.” Grindcore’s obsession with relentless pace makes it inherently accelerationist—racing towards a future that it’s creating before your very eyes. Grab onto Chepang before they leave you behind.

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Organ Dealer – The Weight Of Being

July 28, Everlasting Spew Records

OK, let’s come back down to earth. The Weight of Being isn’t quite as emotionally-resonant as our two predecessors. Two things immediately reveal as much: that brain-splattered cover art and the label name, Everlasting Spew Records. However, the latest release from Organ Dealer is no murky exercise in throwaway goregrind. Resembling Pig Destroyer at their most linear and obtuse, these 21 tracks add up to a precise and bludgeoning collection, full enough brief changes of pace (the punk beats that open “Gluttonous Abundance,” the grooves of “Recurrence Of Nightmares”) to make The Weight Of Being an engrossing 22 minutes of madness.

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Gravesend – Gowanus Death Stomp

October 27, 20 Buck Spin

Here at IO, we’re always going to praise anything released by 20 Buck Spin, and Gravesend are the venerable label’s most pure grind band. Their latest full-length Gowanus Death Stomp sees the NY mob delve even further into violent, nihilistic brutality. The band’s urban wasteland aesthetic remains as gritty and palpable as ever, while this time around, there’s more focus on raw, caveman blasts, which rampage like a furious neanderthal in a litter-strewn alley. Bordering on war metal but without ever delving that opaque abstraction, this is grind at its most geographically-specific and most filthily entertaining.

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Concrete Caveman – Feral

November 10, Strange Mono

Moving from the urban ruins of New York to Los Angeles’ scorched waste, we have the debut from Concrete Caveman. Whereas our previous release was all dirty, miserable anger, Feral is grind at its most gleeful, channeling pit-friendly punk and hardcore as much as grindcore and death metal. The neanderthal metaphor this time would be of a character not unlike the one adorning Feral’s killer cover art grabbing fellow moshers in headlocks so tight their eyes burst from their sockets. The trio call themselves “primordial death punk,” an awesome sobriquet that sums up their riotous approach. Very excited to hear more from this band.

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Fawn Limbs & Nadja – Vestigial Spectra

November 24, Roman Numeral Records / Wolves And Vibrancy

This list aims to cover the many strands of grindcore, from the raw and irreverent to the dense and elaborate. Vestigial Spectra falls firmly in the latter category. An unexpected but quite brilliant collaboration between the Canadian drone duo Nadja and Pennsylvania techgrind trio Fawn Limbs, Vestigial Spectra is unlike any other heavy release this year. Each of these accomplished seven tracks are wildly-unpredictable, encompassing apocalyptic electronics (“Blueshifted) head-scrambling mathgrind (“Black Body Radiation Curve”), resplendent post-metal (“Metastable Ion Decay”), and so much more. A properly knock-out release that constantly keeps you on your toes in service of some jaw-dropping extremity.

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T​Æ​L – S/T

August 31, Self-Released

Jumping onto some powerviolence now (genre purity be damned), we have the self-titled debut by Norway’s T​Æ​L. Sixteen tracks of bass-heavy powerviolence that’ll quake your soul, these songs are brilliantly-structured, full of fun samples (including the funny exchange between David Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton that opens “Anspent”) and utilize an odd production style that marries crystalline drums alongside the genre’s requisite murky bass tones. Mixed and mastered by Will Killingsworth, formerly of Orchid and Ampere, T​Æ​L’s debut serves as a great calling card from the fledgling Norwegian trio.

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moreru – 呪​詛​告​白​初​恋​そ​し​て​世​界

November 30, Musicmine

Y’know how in the introduction to this feature, I involved the idea of Charli XCX using blastbeats? Well the latest from Tokyo’s moreru isn’t a million miles away from it. A bravura fusion of grind, screamo, hyperpop, noise, and more, this is ultra-contemporary music of the most brain-frying kind. Thrillingly free of limitations, there’s electronic beats (“EMO SCREAMO 2045”), glistening solos (“自爆殺戮渋谷交差点”), pitch-shifted vocals (“夕暮れに伝えて”), and so, so much more. Despite its frenetic shifts, the whole thing feels pretty cohesive. It’s like so much of hyperactive internet culture: Don’t think too much about it; just let it spin your head off its axis.

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Jarhead Fertilizer – CARCAREAL WARFARE 

December 8, Closed Casket Activities

The previous full-length from the awesomely-named Jarhead Fertilizer Product of My Environment was one of the best deathgrind releases of the last few years. This year’s CARCAREAL WARFARE ramps everything that worked so well about its older sibling right up to eleven. The blasts are more feral; the squeals are more obnoxious, and the grooves more, well, groovy. Intriguingly, the Maryland four-piece have also started introducing some fabulously-creepy atmospherics, as highlighted by the interlude “Torture Cage.” These moments make this tight but varied collection all the more intimidating—a dank, decrepit cell you’ll never want to escape from.

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Cognizant – Inexorable Nature of Adversity

September 11, Anomalous Mind Engineering

A dark labyrinth of techgrind mania, Cognizant’s second LP Inexorable Nature of Adversity is a convoluted head-spinner that’s as thrilling as it is disorientating. Recalling the skeletal technical death metal of Pyrrhon and the intricate dissonance of Gorguts, this is heavy music at its most audacious and exhilarating. The manic musicianship is a thing to behold, in particular the razor-sharp drumming of grind veteran Bryan Fajardo (Gridlink, Phobia, Kill The Client). The short runtimes make the intense complexity all the more whiplash-inducing, adding up to a dense, scary, and often masterful collection.

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Closet Witch – Chiaroscuro 

November 3

Grind of the murkiest variety, Chiaroscuro is painted in the same jet-black hues as its title. Iowa’s Closet Witch make one hell of a racket, infusing their manic strain of grindcore with screamo and hardcore. Vocalist Mollie Piatetsky possesses a truly terrifying shriek, backed by instrumentation that blurs into a harrowing layer of gauze-like distortion. A guest spot from Full Of Hell’s Dylan Walker exemplifies the like-minded artistry on display across these 13 tracks, which come close to transcending genre limitations, in favor of pure, beautiful extremity. You get the feeling that it won’t be long before Closet Witch put out a properly game-changing release.

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BLIND EQUATION – death awaits

September 15, Prosthetic Records

We’ll end on what will probably be a divisive album. BLIND EQUATION’s second album is a hyperactive and ultra-contemporary collection of cybergrind. Its digital textures and video-game aesthetic will likely turn off many, but death awaits is an undeniably fascinating release. Incorporating elements of glitchcore, deathcore, and hyperpop, this is cybergrind for the internet-age, full of energy and eager to smash together a wild fusion of sounds. It’s brash and over-the-top, but if you sift through its synthetic sinews, there’s surprising levels of emotion and humanity to be discovered within death awaits.

Listen to Degenerate Synapse’s debut EP ahead of its Friday release below.

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Degenerate Synapse releases on CD tomorrow (with cassette incoming sometime soon),

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Despite its minuscule run time, it’s incredibly varied, bouncing between rhythms and tempos to cover the totality of the human experience. The three key aspects are the gurgling basslines, start-stop riffs, and metallic palette, each of which gives Rokubungi some much-needed weight. Rather than coming off as a collection of tracks recorded over a period of time, the record’s tone runs consistent, bridging the negative emotional topics Gendo Ikari cover. Self-hatred, misanthropy, and pity are all explored with a scalpel and a sledgehammer. Given all this, Rokubungi is as strong of a statement as a grindcore band could make with a debut album.

The band comments:

The band melts all of their influences from grind, noise rock, power violence, and heavy metal to drone and noise in ‘ROKUBUNGI.’ We want to write music we find interesting and enjoyable, and we want that to be reflected in ‘ROKUBUNGI,’ an album where there are few compromises in ideas and expression.

Lyrically, the album itself is not a concept from any idea. It’s a forced emotional conscript through society’s last hope, being your last chance to be heard. Our vocalist John delves into many aspects of his own life and brings out his true colours in GENDO IKARI.

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Rokubungi releases tomorrow on Gendo Ikari’s Bandcamp.

Grindcore artists on the Eastern Seaboard are taking the genre in exciting directions. Groups such as New York’s Chepang and Philadelphia’s Bandit have already released pulverizing albums this year, and now Pittsburgh’s Constant Hell, for some time a local mainstay, are here with an album that bottles the essence of their live show and refracts classic grind through 2023’s chaos.

Recorded live in the band’s practice space, Constant Hell sounds like it emerged dripping from the sewers. True to the genre in song length, the record sports numerous quick blitzes of sound that emerge from cocoons of feedback before receding back into fuzz, as on “Political Pig.” On the 11-second “Tear a Nazi in Two,” Constant Hell distill grindcore’s longstanding sense of righteous indignation, cleanly boiling down the three-piece’s sound into a fun-sized squall. The “Southside Party Grind” band clearly channel Pittsburgh’s blend of pugilism and winking irony—as a Steel City resident, one can practically hear the gags and howls of litter-strewn Carson Street in the background.

But this isn’t just a fun romp. Opener “Out of Life/Into the Casket” reads as more of a death metal screed, and closer “Last Words” is a two-minute mushroom cloud of squeals, metal-tinged riffs, and romping punk drumming. Tracks like this are as much Naked City as they are Napalm Death, blurring the line between grind, metal, and experimental music. Constant Hell may stay true to grindcore’s roots in form, but they also clearly are aiming at something grander on this first full-length release.

The band call this album “23 tracks of filthy and noisy grindcore that feel like waking up with a pounding headache soaked in your own piss and vomit while wrapped around the toilet of your local punk squat house.” Stream all of Constant Hell below, and good luck cleaning out your earholes afterward.

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Constant Hell releases July 15th independently via Bandcamp.

So we’re halfway through 2023; that means it’s time for another grind roundup! Ignore the summer and any sun-kissed good vibes—We’re looking exclusively at lean, mean, and ugly new grindcore releases.

Once again, we’ve picked out the cream of the crop from the last few months in the genre. There’s a lot of grind out there and, like all genres, some of it isn’t great. With grind, the low-quality stuff is often immensely eyeball-rolling. I can tell you I’ve spent far too long digging through Bandcamp pages strewn with acts called things like Resin Scraper and Unholy Semen. It needs to be reiterated—99% of goregrind is terrible, and the world has progressed beyond the need for 100% of pornogrind.

So, without further introduction, here’s our roundup of grind releases that show off everything the genre is capable of—visceral thrills, pointed insight, and fearsome artistry. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

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Bandit – Siege of Self
April 20, 2023
Gurkha Commando Blast Team

Bandit are your new favorite grind band. The Philadelphia-based trio play meaty, downtuned grindcore in the vein of Pig Destroyer and put on what looks like an immensely-fun live show. Their third full-length Siege of Self hits all of the genre’s sweet spots–It’s inventive (the phaser-laden riffs of “United in Torment”), technical (the wild solo that closes “Juanita”), and monstrously-groovy (that opening to “Butterfly Knife” could bulldoze walls). This riotous collection is full of quirks and individuality and cements Bandit’s place as one of America’s most interesting modern grind acts.

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Suffering Quota – Collide
May 26, 2023
Tartarus Records

A cool quirk of grind is that it has a distinctly global reach. Some of the best albums in the genre this year have been by bands based in Finland (Rotten Sound’s masterful Apocalypse) and Thailand (Speech Odd’s eccentric Odd World). We can now add to that list the Netherlands, the homeland of Suffering Quota. Their latest album, Collide, is a brilliant work of craftsmanship. Pared down to its bare essentials (even the titles are all just single words), Collide is ruthlessly linear, hurtling to its conclusion (the monolithic closer “Scorn”) with terrifyingly sharp focus. An incendiary collection, it ends with a sample of a raging inferno, as if it has literally combusted.

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Cattle Decapitation – Terrasite
May 12, 2023
Metal Blade Records

We couldn’t leave this one out. Yes, Terrasite isn’t quite as jaw-droppingly unique as the band’s previous benchmarks. Cattle Decapitation are suffering slightly from having set their own bar too high, meaning they get judged by some immensely shigh standards. Nonetheless, Terrasite is a virtuoso collection of deathgrind that makes all other grind acts look unambitious and sluggish. Its 10 tracks are gigantic, swaggering creations packed full of intricate riffs, atmospheric flourishes and ecological-minded misanthropy. Ignore the terrible cover art; this is grind at its most expansive and accomplished.

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Teeth – A Biblical Worship of Violence
May 5, 2023
Nuclear Blast Records

The second successive release on our list to feature a track called “We Eat Our Wrong,” Teeth’s A Biblical Worship of Violence is a crushing EP of mathcore-leaning grind that transcends its genre limitations. These five-tracks are an unrelenting nightmare, fuelled by intuitive structuring, tight instrumentation, deranged vocals, and a guitar tone that could serrate glass. The bending of genre rules may turn away grind purists (check out the frankly-ridiculous breakdown that closes out “EyesHornsMouth”); however, everyone else can bask in the glory of Teeth’s stellar debut for global powerhouse Nuclear Blast Records.

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Pilau – Pressure
May 12, 2023
Capsule Records

Is it grind? Powerviolence? Hardcore? Who cares! Pilau’s Pressure is as much fun as you’ll have with a grind release this year. Across six tracks and seven minutes, the D.C.-based mob (who feature ex-members of grind royalty Magrudergrind and Enemy Soil) draw their name not from the type of rice, but from the Hawaiian slang word for something that’s dirty or filthy. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the band’s grimy, feral sound—best displayed on 48-second rager “Ultimate Demise.” Pilau are no troglodytes, though, as Pressure’s sharply-arranged closer “Desultory” proves. They ooze confidence and flair, which is caked into the crevices of all the ugly, squalid grind goodness.

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Cryptic Void – Physwar//Psywar
May 29, 2023
Self-Released

After a couple of diversions to grind’s outer reaches, we’re back on firm genre footing with Cryptic Void’s Physwar//Psywar. Another act to feature ex-members of a canonical grind band (Insect Warfare), Physwar//Psywar revels in genre staples like sub-30-second track lengths, macabre collage artwork, and eerie samples that lend an air of atmospheric menace to the whirlwind thrills. The only shift from familiarity is the death metal vocals, which are put to nasty, hallowed use across these 13 ragers. It’s tough to choose one highlight; however, the 26-second “Total War” takes some beating in terms of pure grind carnage.

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Elder Devil – Everything Worth Loving
June 16, 2023
Prosthetic Records

An ugly, hallowed, sludge-inflected ripper of an album, Everything Worth Loving is pain incarnate. Informed by the death of lead vocalist Stephen Muir’s mother, these 13 cuts are a relentless howl into the void, as surmised by the title track’s brutal cry, “Why do we love and why does that love leave?” The sludge/grind fusion combines with impressive elegance, shifting between these differing styles (defined by distinctly oppositional tempos) on effortless songs like ”After Flesh” and the titanic title track. An air of murky distortion clouds the whole release, mirroring the empty numbness of its lyrical perspective. Punishing stuff.

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Slugcrust / Swamp – Bind
April 21, 2023
Terminus Hate City

No grind roundup would be complete with the inclusion of a split EP. South Carolina’s Slugcrust open Bind with three tracks of feral mania that shift between intense grind, raw death metal and war metal cacophony. The insane buzzsaw guitar tone is worth the price of entry alone. Swamp’s two tracks are less straightforward grind (the band refer to themselves as “death sludge”); however, the primitive blasts of “Monochrome Dusk” and vicious vocals of “Galvanized” blur boundaries and will impress grind heads with their subtly-intricate savagery. A killer split rife with gnarly variety.

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The Arson Project – God Bless
June 18, 2023
Self-Released

We end our roundup with a quick sojourn to Sweden. The country has a grand history of crust punk with some of the genre’s best bands hailing from the land of ABBA and Ikea—Disfear, Anti Cimex, Skitsystem, etc. The Arson Project infuse this style with some expert grind sections, in service of thrillingly energetic and gloriously heavy goodness. These 10 tracks are pared-down to their essentials—visceral heaviness, lyrical anger, and a distinctly-grind album cover. Fans of acts like Nails and His Hero Is Gone, who fuse grind to hardcore with ferocious élan, will find much to love here.

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