Here, I’ll make it easy for y’all: if you wish the likes of Chat Pile and Intercourse had a even sludgier edge to them, or perhaps were more British, just close the tab and go run through this album, you won’t regret it.
For those that need a bit more convincing, we’re here to talk about, and frankly celebrate, the debut LP of England’s Believe in Nothing, another Church Road Records banger that will no doubt go triple platinum in my house while I drag my bloodied knuckles through each day’s tricks with no treats in sight (Happy Halloween by the way). Having never heard them before, it’s nice to get in on the action now and you’d do well to do the same whether or not you’re an unashamed bandwagoner or not because, according to them, we may not even have a planet soon.
Believe in Nothing sound muffled, not in the neutered sense, but more literally like a large hand is covering their mouth as they try to scream, biting at the fingers for release. There’s just enough that’s legible and audible to curdle the blood and raise the hair, pulling from nothing but an unhinged reality coursing with failing mental health brought on by even more failed societal systems that would rather label us all dregs than address the various situations that got us here. I know enough about England to know that we’re fighting similar battles – where that country is totally fine, ecstatic even, to platform someone like J.K. Rowling (not bolding her name, fuck her), so too are we over here platforming and subsequently worshipping paragons of mass anti-intellectualism and cruelty like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate (fuck those motherfuckers too). That’s to say nothing of our politicians that hold true, abused, corrupted power.
Then again, you don’t need to be entwined with all of that shit to feel what Believe in Nothing are about. The prerequisites of admission are low – shame, burnout, helplessness, these and more are themes touched on in Rot in the most agitated and aggravated rasp and bellow you could imagine. The single “Gut” is more relatable than many people care to admit, lamenting the dehumanization and eye-clawing despair a job can set upon you. Quit and you’re left destitute, no house, no food, no life – pick your doom. What’s worse is there’s no help or recourse. You’re made to feel bad for not doing things the right way, for struggling and being honest about it, so “Gut” is the extreme reaction to that, disemboweling yourself for even a chance of being taken seriously, all laid over the most dismal and morose sludge melodies I’ve probably heard this year. “What Would You Do?” is a harrowing scenario of bystander effect and content farming where someone’s killed while people only watch and film. It’s filled with dark melodies that clash with the increasingly concerned talking and vocals where a particular line at the end caps off the desperation and eventual resignation to death: ‘And a public beheading is better than a lonely overdose in a grand a month flat‘.
And that’s just the more coherent stuff. Most every other song is full-send writhing in the gutters from the opener “Complete Desolation” to the title track cap on top of the bombed-out corpse that Rot turns into by the end. I kind of mean that literally as well – “Boiling Stone” is a very agonized ode to nuclear warfare and the human cost, using big riffs and drums to punctuate the immense godlike power men have wielded against others, going as far as to cite the year 1945 which was the year of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings that killed over 200,000 people and injured far more. “Deserts Are Glass” touches on similar themes of apocalyptic fervor though with more of an environmentalist slant to my ears. Not celebratory, but passionately vivid and a precursor to “Rot”, which ends with the unmistakable scream of ‘man’s greatest achievement will be the destruction of itself‘ which really feels like the combining thesis of the album as a whole.
Believe in Nothing as a name smacks of nihilism, but Rot demands that we care enough to change the circumstances we’ve been dealt so as not to realize the scenes the album conveys to us. We’re honestly not far off, which should scare all of us regardless of anything else like political affiliation and class (and yet…). It’s like how your parents used to scare you straight (well, maybe not, but much of my generation sure knows) – do you want to be a drugged-out loser in jail? Then go to school and do well! Lots to unpack there, but I digress. Believe in Nothing aren’t nearly as hackneyed as that implies of course. The one thing this band has in its favor, for better or worse, is the real world on its side, one slip on the reaper’s banana peel away from cataclysmic points of no return that we haven’t already passed, but would truly send us into down roads that we could only imagine for the most wild of fiction. Remember: the only thing separating fiction and non-fiction is a few bookshelves worth of distance.
All of this and more that I didn’t cover give Believe in Nothing all the thematic power and instrumental grudge they need to hold the world and us accountable for our crimes, some much more than others of course. They’re not here to wag their finger in our face, they’re here to impress upon us the urgency of our various situations using the sickest sludge metal and righteously undignified shouts and bleats, because our undignified world deserves no better. They’re scared just like us, yelping like injured dogs caught in a bear trap and no one helps. Soon enough, they think, we’ll perish and the pain will be over, then our bodies will return to the earth. What Rot has the earned audacity to assert is, what if there isn’t even an earth to be fertilized by our demise in the near future?
