On "Childhood is a Knife in the Throat," Rorcal Explore Lasting Trauma (Video Premiere)

With an apparent fixation on digging into open wounds, Swiss experimental extreme metal group Rorcal broaden their horizons and sharpen their knives on their sixth-full length album Silence. There's an obvious amount of irony in the album title, of course, but it's an especially severe dissonance in this case: Rorcal combines blackened, sludgy doom and noisy drone into a towering, darkened vortex. In other words, it's loud. It's also consistently abrasive and a record that's largely uninterested in straightforward song structures–one whirlwind leads to another with just the occasional nail-biting pause.

Even at its most blistering moments, though, there's a sense of slow-moving inevitability, as if no amount of fast-forwarding is going to get listeners out of the pit that they've ended up in. That's a big part of what makes new single "Childhood is a Knife in the Throat" especially punishing, with the band operating serpentine old-school death metal riffs like one might use a millstone, except that the grain in this scenario is their audience's faces.

We're premiering the track's music video below–the uncomfortable visuals are a spine-tinglingly perfect pairing for the audio.

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The band comments:

Childhood is a Knife in the Throat” is the second track of our new album and the beginning and the end of the song are relatively close to what we usually write, but on this one we let ourselves explore a more death metal vibe for the central parts.

“Childhood is a knife in the throat“ is also a quote from W. Mouawad’s “Incendies” and it’s about how deep and painful a psychological wound received in early life can be, and how it can seal someone’s fate.

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Silence releases September 29th via Hummus Records.