‘Some might call this a nervous breakdown, others might call it depression, but to me it’s just Tuesday, man.‘
Intercourse have been a lot of things in their career, but hopeful isn’t one of them. They’re best at formulating vignettes of societal oddities, the total collapse of human decency, and complete subsumption within mental illness. It’s satire at its foundation, just twisted even further so as to cause concern to anyone listening that isn’t in on the joke, like you can’t play the songs too loud unless you wanna risk militarized cops coming to your door for a ‘wellness check’ or getting flagged for increased screenings when you go to fly out of an airport.
If you’ve read either of my reviews on the band’s last two projects, then you know this, and for the third year in a row, I feel drawn to their call once again with How I Fell in Love with the Void. That alone should tell you the kind of place I am at in my life lately – to hear vocalist Tarek Ahmed’s grating howl and find kinship in it, to look at the sound waves produced by the heavy and barren guitars and think they’re friend-shaped, is truly sick, perverted shit and I *cough* think I’m coming down with something.
Every song on How I Fell in Love with the Void is always threatening to jump off its rails. You have Ahmed yelling in your face, but he does so on top of tight and relatively collected instrumentation, much of which could back a less manic band, but that’s just not the kind of world they or we live in. Intercourse waste zero time with getting into it too – “The Ballad of Max Wright” blasts out the gate with black metal intensity and a cutting scream from Ahmed. The title is a reference to the late actor of the same name best known for the TV show ALF, and if you’re too young for that reference… here you go, or just watch the above video. It’s a dark take on if someone like Wright, who acted opposite a literal puppet for the prime time entertainment of millions, just went full D-FENS one day and came into the studio on berserk mode fueled by jealousy ready for fucking blood. It’s like a random cutaway gag from Family Guy with all the vulgarity and bleak humor that implies – ‘I hope you’re ready to get your voice box cut out by a grown man with no savings account. I’ll give it to ya, you talk a good game, that poker face is the best I’ve ever seen. But you’re mistaken if you think I’m gonna play second fiddle to a fucking muppet.‘
It’s the kind of shit where most people wouldn’t know whether to laugh or be scared. Any fan of absurdism who’s been through some shit in life will likely default to the former, and those are my people. Some songs get a bit more grounded with their vein-bulging stewing though. “Zoloft and Blow” is a fave, lamenting the dissolution of a marriage from the POV of an overtapped husband who did everything right (‘We had it all. A beautiful home, white picket fence, big screen TV, HBO, Grey Poupon‘) and still died unhappy wearing his wedding ring. There’s still reason to laugh – the lyrics at the end conjure one of the most pitiful images I’ve heard in a while over cataclysmic riffing: ‘Now I’m dead and Rob Schneider’s still walking around up there breathing, ripping into woke at America Fest, maybe even getting his dick sucked‘. I laughed again from typing that out. Fuck Rob Schneider.
Somehow, Intercourse just effortlessly tap into new wells of depravity and energy with each new release. An argument can certainly be made for How I Fell in Love with the Void being their heaviest, most deranged, and yes, their best work yet. Songs are on the meatier side like they were on Halo Castration Institute, but even the shorter ones like “Cadaver Resume” burn so hot in their time that they feels robust in themes and musicality while giving you lyrical whiplash (‘Overworked, underpaid, thinking of financing an over-the-pants lobotomy‘). The longest song by a few seconds, “Family Suicide Gun”, is one of their most doomed songs yet (in tone, not genre), haranguing about the ideas of survival, legacy, and regret where the ‘gun’ in question can be seen as a metaphor for generational trauma, mental illness and health issues in general, maybe even poverty – anything that plagues entire family trees and disenfranchises them unless someone is lucky enough to break free from the samsara-like cycle of pain and suffering by hitting it big with some fairy-tale lottery. The album practically yields to it all at the end with some of the best lyrics on the whole damn thing: ‘Passed down from father to son and sent back to God for a refund. Father Time eats us all from the asshole up. I look on in disgust, wait my turn.‘
Intercourse are invulnerable at this point. Even as they emulate self-destruction with each song, they’re an inevitability that will visit us as is their wont because the world just won’t relent, so neither will they. We are collectively incapable of birthing the new, better world we all want so much and therefore it will gestate and rot in the womb as we watch through teary eyes and behind maddened customer service smiles as we fight to live among people who see us as expendable meat – and that’s just the nicer ones. As its own art and as a noisy, heavy distillation of modern post-9/11, post-COVID life, How I Fell in Love with the Void hits harder than a father’s belt. If the songs are Rorschach blots meant to reveal our more devilish tendencies and what’s ripping our skulls open from the inside, then Intercourse are the disorderlies on a stage putting on a live show supervised by Nurse Ratched while we all wail and froth in our own personal apocalypses.
