The US and, generally by extension, much of the rest of the world is fucked. Like, more than before, in the accelerationist sense with decades of hard-won progress threatened in a manner of days. I cannot comprehend feeling any other way besides sad or angry right now, to the point where I don’t even feel like writing this review, but we press on. Ball up top. If our worlds stopped because of having to contend with the breakdown of rotting capitalistic society, time would simply hang an out-of-service sign on the planet and call it a day. I’ll spare you further platitudes and just say GRIEF RITUAL have provided desperately needed catharsis to end off this horrid-ass month and start to a surely fucked year.
Another banger from Church Road Records (these people only know success), GRIEF RITUAL is battering, dark, monolithic hardcore from England, our Western pals in struggle who have been dealing with their own fascistic rising waters. Think Burner and how they approach metallic hardcore, but GRIEF RITUAL niche themselves down deeper and harder into lurching hardcore anguish and the primal feelings of returning to our feral, base forms as an act of protest, as is fitting for the times. I feel like an amoeba with a big club when I hear shit like this, smashing it into symbols of imperialistic propaganda we were raised to defend and obey blindly.
Depending on the song, Collapse festers in this doom-like slowness or eviscerates with precision and speed. Seeing as this is a debut album, and a really good one at that, it’s smart to lay all the cards on the table in this way. I see the value in showing people what you can do at the risk of spreading too thin or lacking focus (things I don’t think this album is guilty of), earning fans one way or another. The fans that’ll stick around are the ones that appreciate it all and by that metric, you can consider me one.
There’s friends too – like any good community that’s stronger together, GRIEF RITUAL reached out to pals for assistance. Harry Nott from the aforementioned Burner shows up on “Bile” to lay into the wanton destruction modern neoliberal political tyrants and oligarchs have been waging against us and the world for decades with no end in sight. Nott’s quite at home with the grassroots vitriol – while GRIEF RITUAL isn’t as incendiary and jaw-shatteringly upfront as Terminal Nation for instance, the lyrics can’t be misinterpreted:
‘A vantablack smog
Coating the planet
A wave of disease
Turning all life barren
Twisted invocation
One last resort
As we count down to
Annihilation’
Meanwhile, “Recursion” has Cage Fight‘s Rachel Aspe and together with GRIEF RITUAL host a veritable blanket party of chubby riffs, guttural vocals, and machine gun drums. The themes of vile, hopeless torture and wasting away in a decaying prison of the body can infer a lot (extreme disability or debilitation like from Alzheimer’s disease come to mind), but the gist of the damage is as mental as it is physical – a complete breakdown of the person from the synapses to the molecules of the body.
Deep cuts tend to wane in speedy aggression more with tracks like “Swine” and “Marrow” becoming dejected tombs of terror that really lean into the weight and plummet a listener to hellish, dingy depths. “Swine” has pulsing industrial accouterments that mimic the guitar melody and drum rhythm, while the latter track is a longer menace that haunts long into the next loop of the album. I’m reminded a bit of the closer “Infinite Misery” off of Cannibal Corpse‘s Kill album with the ominous and atomizing instrumentation in the intro, but it takes on a wholly different form when the music drops out periodically in the middle except for a lone, destitute guitar melody filling the negative space in the most troubling way, like the song is pushing your face into the ground.
“Marrow” cleanly sums up the album’s – and likely the band’s greater – ethos with its final words, spoken flatly though matter-of-factly: ‘You cannot reform systems designed to harm. It’s time to dismantle all they’ve established, and make them feel the weight of this world. Make them collapse.’ This is a sentiment echoed long and hard among the politically aware who insist this is the type of trouble you can’t just vote away, and ending your metal/hardcore album on them while we bask in the most turmoil we’ve ever seen in half a century at least is a message to reckon with. GRIEF RITUAL crafted a call to action with riffs and it’s my hope that the younger generation and others in need of a kick off the cliff of reality heed it and catch up to the others who are trying to do something about it.
Collapse as an album though is beyond solid, regardless of its message. Though the two are inseparable to someone like me who listens to music like this for inner strength and to remind myself we’re not alone, this is an album that can be enjoyed from the most surface level to the bellowing depths. So quickly the band have shown their strengths in power, writing, and execution, providing a sonic guillotine to bisect the fuckshit rotting the world from the inside out. GRIEF RITUAL may not bring about world peace and harmony all by themselves, but, hopefully, they’re provide the soundtrack to the boiling revolution that does.