The Darkness, the Dread, the Suffering was recorded and mixed at Bravo Studios by Buschemeyer and mastered by Greg Dawson at BWC Studios. It’s set for release on vinyl, CD and digitally via Hypaethral Records on July 10. Place your preorder here (Hypaethral web shop) or here (Bandcamp).

Buschemeyer had this to say about the new album:

“Since Trev and I had remained friends after all these years and had both been a part of the short-lived New Day Rising reunion, where we recorded a bunch of new songs, the idea was floated around to potentially do a new Spread the Disease recording. As the two main songwriters, we knew that we could revisit the blackened hardcore style material with some fresh vigor. I had been keeping my chops up with that style of music with Die In The Light and Trev had been playing in multiple projects on his own as well.

“The songs came together relatively easily, but it took a long time to come to fruition. This is the reality of being older, with families, careers, etc. You put in the time when you can. In the end, we’re stoked on how they turned out and we’re excited to play them live!”

The post Full Album Stream: Spread the Disease –<em>The Darkness, the Dread, the Suffering</em> appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

The full lineup features Gambit (samples, sound manipulation, electronics), White Ward’s Dima Dudko (saxophone), Claire Deak (harp, flute), Christian Molenaar (drums, violin), Churchburn/ex-Vital Remains guitarist Dave Suzuki, Justin Sweatt (synth), Isaac Takeuchi (cello, violin), Mark Warm II (piano), prolific producer Jeff Zeigler (vibraphone) and Sleepwalker’s PBV on no less than six instruments. It’s a massive undertaking and a rather large departure from what readers have come to expect from Crowhurst, so Decibel sat down with Gambit to get into the nitty gritty about Thorns: the underlying concept, coordinating 10 musicians recording in different places, songwriting and the importance of making art that calls to you.

Thorns is out on November 6 via Sleeping Giant Glossolalia, with pre-orders coming later.

It’s been seven years since III came out. What, like what’s been the process since then? Have you been working on this new record, Thorns, since then or did you take some time to do other stuff before you came to it? 

I started Executioner’s Mask around the time that the pandemic was starting, and I worked on a few of those records for Profound Lore Records and that was pretty fun. I got to work with Gerald Scarfe who did all the art for Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which was fun.

So that band kind of takes off and does its own thing. What does it look like for you when you come back to Crowhurst?

Honestly, I didn’t really feel like it was worth coming back to the project unless I had something significant to say. I’ve been working on Thorns pretty much since before the pandemic. We were supposed to fly to Château d’Hérouville to track that, but the pandemic kind of put the kibosh on it, so we were sort of forced to reevaluate what the record could be. The extra time through the pandemic made it a little bit easier because I feel like everybody sort of had the opportunity to to figure out their recording styles and just give people a little bit of time.

Do you think that the record was the shape of the record that you had in mind originally? Does it sound like that today? 

No. Honestly, it sounds significantly bigger now and more involved than I could have imagined it being had we just taken a studio approach because this is so layered and so dense that it really did sort of require everybody who was working on it to take their time and work through their own process to get it done the way it had been done.

Would you consider this to be a significantly different record than others than other records that you’ve done, or do you feel that it’s close to some of the drone work you’ve done in the past?

I think that where Thorns sits is in a place that is informed by pretty much every era of Crowhurst. It has elements that are really harsh. It has elements that are very psychedelic. It’s got elements of classical and traditional classical music. It has elements of minimalism, black metal. There’s a little bit of everything right up until the end of that run with III into the film-scoring work.

It’s probably the most easily-listenable record you’ve made in a long time. Not in that it’s not dense but I think that it feels very polished. It feels like there was an intention of the way that it was supposed to feel and kind of take you through.

I took more influence in this from things like A Silver Mount Zion Orchestra’s He Has Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms… and Sunn O)))’s Monoliths and Dimensions, the Kronos Quartet film score. Stuff like that was all a much closer touch point for influence for me than a lot of traditional noise and metal stuff, but I think those are things that also stand there, on their own, as being heavy enough for listeners of extreme music while being accessible enough for people who aren’t really informed in that world.

It feels, not to make the most obvious comparison in the world, similar to a band like Ulver that has metal and and harsher roots, but so much of their work after that fits in that realm, even if it’s not explicitly noise or metal.

Perdition City is another one that was an influence in making this, the idea of something being truly cinematic.

We’re talking about how Thorns is cinematic.There’s an underlying concept behind the record, right?

The record is based on a series of pieces and a concept by the artist Gage Lindsten. 

When I read that, it made me think of Neuromancer by William Gibson. 

Yeah, very influenced by that.

Did you have these characters and this and this world in mind before you started making this record, or was that a thing that sort of developed as you heard the music and collaborated with all these people? 

The City of Thorns was really inspired by not just Neuromancer and classic sci-fi, but just sort of what’s going on around us—traveling around in places like Manchester, areas of Belgium, near the French-Belgian border. Areas that felt like monuments to a time that felt more thriving, and also just walking around Philadelphia and seeing things where  so much history that has slowly morphed throughout the eras into, you know, from thriving businesses to cell phone shops to vacant storefronts. Seeing places that were like banks, with names carved in stone turning into Subways, the restaurant, uh, and then turning into ruins and thinking about how close we are in the era of Elon Musk and oligarchy and luxury on credit, and performative luxury, how close we are to what feels like something that William Gibson would have written. That kind of atmosphere, not necessarily the characters as much as the characters of the city we live in, had inspired it.

That makes a lot of sense. You sort of had this outline then and then you were able to fill it in with more specific characters after that.

Yeah, and Gage had already sort of created the visual elements, so it was a lot easier to take the visual elements and this idea of what Thorn City could be beyond those illustrations and really run with it.

Gage did these illustrations and you have this artwork and this concept for the city. What are you going to take that imagery and use it for? Is it just to inform the album and to be on the promotional work, or will they feature in more things that tie into Thorns?

Honestly I can’t tell you because right now. We’ve got the games and obviously we’ve got the packaging, but it really comes down to if people feel that this story resonates with them. I would love to expand this world. If people wanna know more about the city of Thorns and dive deeper into this world, I would love to take them.

So there’s a computer game in development about the City of Thorns and the characters?

So far the whole city is built. I’m just transferring it from an executable to a Web GL file.  

I’m just trying to make it play in browser now because I don’t know Unity that well, so it’s a crash course.

I do think that today it’s more important than ever to create something that you can feel proud of. It’s in a way that is independent of any sort of modern metric system that we’ve been using now for years because they don’t work. Nobody cares anymore how many streams you have because streams are so easily faked. And you know playlisting works to a point, but it comes down to whether or not you are proud of the work you’re making. And if you can’t stand on 10 toes and be like, “This is the coolest thing and I’m proud to have made it, I’m proud to be able to show it to the world and however many people hear it, I’m stoked to have done it,” then what are you doing? 

The label system has effectively collapsed. It’s not where it was even 10 years ago and the booking market and live music market is so in flux in comparison to where it used to be that you just can’t focus on any of that. You just have to be happy with what you’re making. So, you know, if you want to have a game that goes with your record, if you wanna make a tabletop RPG, if you wanna create a card game, a short film, create a whole puppet show—do it, because now is the time. You have all the resources and there’s an audience. If nobody’s doing it, you should be doing it.

Thorns has 10 collaborating musicians on it. What does it look like for you to put this band together?

Honestly, putting this band together was pretty easy because everybody who is on it I’ve worked with everyone in some capacity, for the most part. Dave Suzuki is the exception but pretty much everybody I’ve already worked with, like Claire and whatnot. It was more a matter of calling people who were the right people for this particular project, I think after this many records, I’m just sort of fortunate to have access to so much talent. It’s really a blessing.

Were people recording in their own areas and then the record was assembled? No one was in the same room making Thorns, right?

No, no, nobody was in the same room.

Is this the kind of thing where you were tweaking things constantly during the writing process, or was it the kind of thing where, once you started working on it, it was like everyone was on the same page and didn’t need a lot of direction?

The closer we got. to a finish, the less tweaking was done. So when we start it, Christian will send me stuff that I tweak heavily and as the track progresses, it becomes clear I think to everyone what needs to be done. So maybe the second or third musician might get some direction, and by the 4th or 5th musician it’ll be like, “Play what you think is appropriate for this track.”

It builds very foundationally, from the ground up, like there’s an order.

Yeah, there’s a structure to how these things work so I think everybody feels that their voice is heard on the record in the way that they’re most OK with. It feels most representative of both who they are and the vision that we all have for the track.

You have a lot of different instruments than you’d hear on a lot of Western records like PBV from Sleepwalkers playing dulcimer, balalaika, 8-String ukulele, bouzouki and quray. You also have guys like Dave Suzuki, who I would imagine that anybody reading this article knows him for Churchburn or Vital Remains. Where do you get the inspiration to go this route instead of the more traditional expectations? 

Dave’s dad was Hiroshi Suzuki, who made the jazz album Cat, which is one of my favorites. Dave has always been a big supporter of Crowhurst so it was a joy being able to work with him, because I think he’s one of the greatest solo guitar players in the world. Instead of mixing him as a lead, I think having him play in a way that was texturally very interesting—our big influence was Eddie Hazel’s guitar on Maggot Brain, where it was so acid-drenched and emotional. To have that as a sort of textural backdrop was very interesting I think, even to Dave, certainly to myself. It’s just playing outside of the paradigm of what we’re used to, as listeners and as people who are creating. 

PBV, they’re so supremely talented and we just worked on something together, a film score for an African film. They played those instruments and they were such interesting instruments sonically that it felt right to include them, and to include them because so much of the record has electronic tones. To have instruments that felt organic and natural really brings things down to a more human realm. 

This record comes out on Sleeping Giant Glossolia in November. That’s a new label partnership for you, right? 

They put out a lot of records I love and they’re just really good people. 

It fits being somewhere with Ramleh and Oxbow. It’s a very fitting home for a record like this that’s less orthodox than other records you’ve done. 

It’s also just that I respect the way they do things, which is, after previous experiences with labels, very important to me. If the record is good enough, it will find an audience but if a label is difficult enough, you won’t have the energy to find that audience. 

The post Interview: Crowhurst Founder Jay Gambit Discusses New Album, <i>Thorns</i> appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

“’Error City’ is a band favorite on the new album,” says guitarist and vocalist Nate Berens. “It’s fast and energetic while maintaining the ferocity we strive for. Lyrically, it calls to mind some of the great science fiction of the last 100 plus years and, while it isn’t necessarily about one particular thing, it does derive its essence from those stories.”

Catch the band live:
7/12 St Louis at The Sinkhole w/ Consumer Culture and Death Pose

Preorder the album here. 

The post Track Premiere: Iron Linings – “Error City” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

At the heart of “Spirit Helper” is a traditional Blackfeet morning prayer song that Kicking Woman entrusted to Enslaved as the foundation for a new composition. Instead of simply sampling the original, the band reshaped its own sound around the prayer’s cadence and spiritual weight. The result is less a cross-cultural collaboration for its own sake than a meditation on connection, and one that Enslaved describes as among the most profound artistic experiences of their career. Decibel caught up with Ivar for an in-depth look into “Spirit Helper” and 35 years of Enslaved:

Decibel:  Enslaved marks its 35th anniversary this year. The band has been such a key part of your life since you were a teenager. After all that time, what made “Spirit Helper” feel like uncharted territory instead of just another collaboration?

Ivar: I think what made it different was that it didn’t actually begin as a musical collaboration. Looking back, the song probably started years before there was any thought of writing it. It began with meeting people. First through Fire in the Mountains, then through By Norse and our management, and eventually through getting to know members of the Blackfeet Nation. I met Nick Rink at Fire in the Mountains in 2025, and through Nick I got to know Kevin Kicking Woman. For me, that’s really the key. Usually collaborations begin with music. Somebody says, “Let’s write something together,” and then you see where it goes. Here it was almost the opposite. The relationships came first, and the music emerged naturally from those relationships. That also meant there was a responsibility that felt quite different. We’ve spent thirty-five years using mythology and old traditions as a language in Enslaved—not as something nostalgic, but as a way of exploring what it means to be human. Then suddenly you’re invited into a dialogue with another living tradition that has been carrying those same kinds of questions for generations, albeit in a completely different cultural context.

I never felt we were making a “cross-cultural project.” Honestly, I don’t think any of us were interested in that. It felt much more like meeting fellow human beings who happened to have inherited another way of expressing something we’ve been trying to understand through our music for decades. So yes, after thirty-five years, it genuinely felt like new ground. Not because we were trying to do something different, but because something different happened to us first.

Decibel: Kevin Kicking Woman entrusted you with a traditional morning prayer song as the foundation for the track. How did that shape your writing process, and did it force you to approach composing differently than you normally would for Enslaved?

Ivar: Completely. I don’t think I’ve ever started writing an Enslaved song from that point before. Usually, I begin with a riff, an atmosphere or maybe a rhythmic idea, and then I gradually discover where the music wants to go. Here, there was already something there. Kevin’s morning prayer wasn’t simply a melody or a vocal line—it already had its own identity, its own pulse and its own purpose.

Quite early on, it became clear to me that this couldn’t be one of those collaborations where you write an Enslaved song first and then invite someone to participate. To me, that would have missed the whole point. Instead, I tried to understand what was already happening in Kevin’s singing. I spent a lot of time just listening to it. Not analyzing it in a technical sense, but trying to understand its natural movement—where it breathes, where it settles, where it builds. It gradually became obvious that if this was going to work, our music had to adapt to his song, not the other way around. That actually made the process both more difficult and more liberating. Difficult because I had to let go of quite a few musical ideas that I liked, simply because they belonged to another song. But also liberating because once I stopped trying to control where the music was going, the song began revealing its own identity.

Decibel: You said you wanted the music to adapt to Kevin’s cadence and vocal performance rather than the other way around. What did that mean in practical terms? Were there riffs or arrangements you had to rethink to make the song work?

Ivar: Oh yes. Quite a lot, actually. I am kinda used to building things around fairly defined structures. Even when Enslaved gets quite progressive, there’s usually a rhythmic architecture that everything grows from. Kevin’s singing comes from a completely different place. It’s guided by language, by breath and by intention,

That sounds a bit abstract, but it became a very practical way of working. There were riffs I really liked that simply didn’t belong in this piece. They weren’t wrong; they just belonged somewhere else. Once I accepted that, the arrangement started falling into place much more naturally. I suppose that’s one of the things I enjoyed most about writing “Spirit Helper.” It reminded me that composing isn’t always about adding things. Sometimes it’s about removing your own expectations and letting the music find its own balance.

Decibel: Fire in the Mountains seems to have played a huge role in bringing this together. What is it about FITM that transcends your typical metal festival in 2026?

Ivar: I’ve been fortunate enough to play festivals all over the world, and I love festivals. But Fire in the Mountains has always felt like it was trying to become something more than just another weekend of concerts.

People actually spend time together there. Musicians, artists, organisers, Indigenous community members, audiences… You find yourself talking about things that don’t normally come up backstage at a festival. When the festival moved onto Blackfeet land, that feeling became even stronger. Suddenly, there was another layer of meaning to everything that was happening. It wasn’t simply about bringing a festival to a beautiful place. It became a meeting between communities. And perhaps even building of a new community?

Decibel: Enslaved has always drawn inspiration from Norse history and mythology. Did working so closely with Kevin and the Blackfeet community give you a different perspective on how traditional cultures preserve their stories through music?

Ivar: Very much so. One thing it reinforced for me was that traditions only stay alive if they’re lived. They’re not preserved because somebody writes a book about them or puts them in a museum. They’re preserved because people continue to sing the songs, speak the language, perform the ceremonies and pass them on to the next generation. That’s something I found very moving about spending time with Kevin and the Blackfeet community. At the same time, it also reminded me to be careful about drawing too many comparisons. Every tradition has its own history and its own identity. I’m not interested in saying, “This is just like Norse mythology.” It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. What I do think they share is something more fundamental. They both remind us that we’re part of a much longer human story than our own individual lives. That’s something Enslaved has been exploring from the very beginning, and this collaboration gave me another perspective on that. It didn’t replace anything we believed before; it expanded the perspective and the conversation.

Decibel: Looking back over Enslaved’s evolution, from the raw early records to where the band is today, where does “Spirit Helper” fit? Does it feel like a one-off collaboration, or could it point toward another direction for the band’s future?

Ivar: I honestly don’t know, and over the years I’ve learned not to make too many predictions about Enslaved. If you’d asked me after almost any album whether it pointed towards the next one, I’d probably have been wrong. The band has always developed in a fairly organic way. We don’t usually decide on a direction first and then write music to fit it. We write, we explore, and eventually we begin to understand where we’ve ended up. I suspect “Spirit Helper” will become part of that process as well. Whether it is likely that we will make another collaboration like this isn’t really the question for me – I think what stays with you are the experiences themselves. Once you’ve worked this closely with people you respect, and once you’ve had the privilege of being invited into a collaboration like this, it inevitably changes you in some way. As a musician, as a composer, probably as a person as well. So I don’t think of “Spirit Helper” as a new chapter or a one-off experiment. I think of it as becoming part of Enslaved’s vocabulary. How that vocabulary will express itself in the future… We’ll discover that when we get there.

The post ENSLAVED’s Ivar Bjørnson Talks New Collaboration “Spirit Helper”: “After 35 Years, it Genuinely Felt like New Ground.” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

“We wanted to avoid the typical performance video, so we let the director and the team run with an idea that immediately clicked with us. We’ve always loved their work, and they share the same sense of humor we do. The result is a story about an insecure vampire with plenty of tongue-in-cheek moments. The lyrics have absolutely nothing to do with the video’s story, and that’s exactly how we wanted it. We love that contrast, and we’re beyond happy with how the whole thing turned out. Crank it up!”

The post Video Premiere: Lommi – “Rather” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

Fast forward to April 2026. While Green, Mobley and Munday’s games of choice may have changed (willingly or no), their love of the game remains undisputed. As per usual, the quintet is packing their touring schedule, eager to perform tracks from newest LP No Place of Warmth to the metal masses. But as the group continues to level up, the time has come for Kill Feed to power down—at least for a while. After three-and-a-half years of interviews, North America’s most extremely extreme gaming column is going on an indefinite hiatus. We’re not exactly certain what the future will bring, but we remain hopeful that this is “to be continued” rather than “game over.” To send us off in glory for now, please enjoy the following conversation with our friends about Arc Raiders, Rust, Hearthstone Battlegrounds and (of course) Magic: The Gathering. GG everyone and thanks for the games.

No Place of Warmth is available now via Century Media Records and can be purchased here.
Follow Frozen Soul on Bandcamp, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The post KILL FEED 085: FROZEN SOUL Are Just Looking to Survive appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

Florida sludge miscreants Crud have never sounded especially optimistic, but on “Demiurge Blues,” the first single from their forthcoming sophomore album Human Decency, the band returns sounding less like they crawled out of the swamp than like they were dragged back into it with a grudge. The track marks Crud’s first new music since 2019, and while six years of jobs, marriages, kids, distance, and the usual indignities of continued existence might soften a lesser band, Crud appear to have used the time away to make their sludge uglier, stranger, and more purposeful.

Born in Miami in 2015 as a stripped-down two-piece featuring Julie Mejia on bass and Mariel Zayas-Bazan on drums, Crud gradually mutated into their current form with guitarist Kris Garcia and vocalist Andy S. Their early material leaned primitive and confrontational, but Human Decency finds the band working with a broader sense of movement: still low, still mean, still very much allergic to polish, but more dynamic in the way it shifts between crawl, rupture and collapse.

“Demiurge Blues” is a fitting reintroduction. It doesn’t simply lumber; it lurches, convulses, and changes shape, dragging old-school sludge weight through something more frantic and ’90s-scarred. Thematically, the song takes aim at creation, power, and divinity itself, which is about as cheerful as you’d hope from a band returning after half a decade to remind everyone that the world did not, in fact, get better while they were gone.

“Our older material lumbers, but this track is more dynamic, playing with tempo and styles in a way that reads more like a narrative of influences,” says drummer Mariel Zayas-Bazan. “It’s like a eulogy of sludge poured over something raw and urgent from the ’90s. The unexpected arc is what makes it exciting, while still feeling like us.”

Human Decency arrives this September via Totem Cat Records. The album was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jonathan Nuñez of Torche/Shitstorm at Sound Artillery Studio, with the band emphasizing immediacy over polish and tracking the core of the record in two days. Crud will also join Dopethrone and Fister for a short Southeast run in September, where audiences can experience these new songs at an appropriately unsafe volume.

Listen to “Demiurge Blues” below.

The post Track Premiere: Crud – “Demiurge Blues” appeared first on Decibel Magazine.

New song “Drip,” which you can stream below, is a perfect representation of that balance. Guitarist Nick Crider and drummer Nathaniel Roseberry throw down aggressive vocals on this specific track, taking aim at the passage of time and at current events discussed later in the article. If you’re already familiar with Dumb Waiter, you’ll notice an uncharacteristic level of restraint in the performances (which also includes saxophonist Tristan Brennis and bassist Keith Paul), making room for the dual-vocal attack.

You can dig into “Drip” below and don’t skip Decibel‘s chat with Crider and Brennis, discussing writing with and without vocals, saxophone in heavy music and getting vulnerable with listeners. Change is out on July 31 via Ossein Records.

You guys changed up your approach to writing and playing music with Dumb Waiter on this album. Can you explain how you were feeling about the music before and how that changed? 

TB: I think it was a collective understanding from the band. The previous album Gaust Gists was very much of a covid-incubated album. It felt like we were trapped in a room for a few years writing that final avant-garde album and we got to the end of it, we were happy with it. We started writing the next album and it really just felt like we’re repeating ourselves, which is something we were really not trying to do. It felt like we weren’t sure what territory to cover instrumentally and it was this collective agreement, “I think we’ve got to start talking, start saying something.” It was a rash idea that took form over two years as we bought mics, bought stands, started seeing what it would look like. 

Did any of you have experience doing vocals in bands before? 

NC: I’ve been in a bunch of bands. Some of them I did vocals in, but it was all metal vocals—screeching, screaming, grunting, stuff like that. I was very conscious of wanting to take the agitated, spoken route and it was definitely something I had to find the tone. It was harder for me… I knew how I wanted the tone to be. It was harder for me to open up enough to not feel silly doing it. Even just in the room full of these guys I’ve known forever, it takes a lot to break out of that. That was a big evolution in the singing for me. 

The lyrics can get pretty personal, which is a big difference from writing stuff that doesn’t even have vocals.

TB: I know Nathaniel also did vocals in previous projects like Jefferson Plane Crash but a lot of them are powerviolence or grindcore bands, so it’s trying to extract the confidence that comes with that and break it down.

NC: And he’s the most melodic person on the record now. He’s the one trying to sing and he’s mostly done brutal stuff.

TB: That’s a good point from moving about something that is a subjective instrumental. I would say that the earlier work in some weird ways is still personal but when it’s instrumental, it means something different to every single person who listens to it. I think once you put words to it, it becomes much more relatable much more quickly.

NC: Even then, I found that when we were making instrumental music, I felt like people were getting the point and then I realized that they weren’t at all. Then I realized that even if I say direct things, it’s not coming from my head. Direct lines are still open to interpretation. 

What did it look like for Dumb Waiter to write these songs? Had you written these ideas intending to be instrumental and then changed them up to add vocals? 

NC: It took a while for us to get the process down and I think you can kind of tell that on the record. We’re throwing so many things in a room and trying to make it work. This was the process of us throwing away perfectly good things. Everybody left the room at some point angry about this thing because we’re trying to cut so much and we’re trying to find enough room to put the vocals in there, and just take a more direct approach in general. 

TB: I think if you listen to the full album, it’s kind of like Frankenstein’s monster. There’s cadavers, there’s parts of songs that might have been instrumental ideas. We probably had three or four instrumental songs mapped out before we really made the definitive choice to make this a vocal album. I think we might have completely shelved some of those songs, but there are definitely pieces of them. I know the first track was written and rewritten like six times. It’s definitely the oldest idea. 

I would say there’s definitely a good number of these—there’s thirteen tracks and I would say at least half of them, we’d already made the shift and were more intentionally writing the songs with the rest of the album in mind. Fresh riffs with the vocals very firmly in mind. 

When you started to write the lyrics, what were you focusing on? Was it personal stuff, the fact that the world is fucked and you had to say something, a combination? 

NC: For me, I started being esoteric and very general but as I would write things, I would realize what I was trying to say to myself and lead into that. A lot of it became political for me and a lot of it was trying to digest growing older, friends and family, stuff getting fucked up and stuff being all over the place. I had to lean off the talk radio and news for a while just because I was so angry all the time and you can definitely hear that through the record. 

TB: I don’t think we intended for it to be any one thing. It’s just a layer of honesty and you blink and realize we’re not stoked with the state of the world. 

The song that we’re going to premiere is the song “Drip.” What was that song like to write, what does it mean to you guys? 

NC: That was one of the songs that was pre-knowing the process of vocals. We’ve wrote and rewrote that a million times. My lines—”Paint over the stained glass” is talking about indoctrination and what can we do to change this? Time is limited and numbered. 

TB: There are a lot of moments where, in the instrumental history of Dumb Waiter, we give each other way too much intellectual freedom and I think we’re just lucky that, a lot of times, it works out. 

You’ve been working together so long that your styles have probably rubbed off on each other. 

NC: It’s definitely intuitive but towards the end of the writing process, there was a bit for me to reckon with trying to get everybody on the same page. Maybe we can lean a certain way if this song seems too disjointed. 

I think Nathaniel would agree that “Drip drip drip” is the time passing and “Feeling trapped under ice” can definitely be direct or loose, but we’re hoping this thing winds down. 

TB: There is that line of “trapped under ice” and I know ICE has existed for decades or more, but I feel like Nathaneil wrote that line far before any current escalation with current ICE. 

NC: But then he realized. It was one of those moments where you’re like, “I’m singing this pretty angrily, I am pretty pissed about this word.”

TB: It’s interesting how it took a new life after it was written. 

When you guys are writing, a saxophone is a kind of non-traditional instrument to have in rock or metal music. Do you ever feel like you have to balance its presence or the way you’re performing so it doesn’t feel like it’s overtaking the other elements? 

TB: I think there’s definitely an intent there. In the past, I think I thought that more. Nick and I, our writing and lyrical content has intuitively leaned into each other. I think our effects patterns and our outputs over the years leaned into each other. I very much know how to play to Nick’s synthesizer-guitar and I know where the bandwidth that needs to be taken up is. 

I think this album was a challenge because I was trying to do as little as possible note-wise and busyness-wise, to create as much negative space for the vocals to really shine. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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Why the hype?
CREEPY CRAWLERS! Remember that play kit from the 1990s or am I dating myself here? You would put this weird ass gelatinous goo in a metal tray and cook it until it became hard. That’s kind of what this band reminds me of. Gelatin-like bursts of groovy goregrind with pitch-shifted vocals that sound like a german shepherd passing a kidney stone. Oh, and the oompa beats? They are ubiquitous and quite tasteful. Love me an oompa beat.

Latest release?
Split w/ Posthumous Regurgitation, Headsplit. This shit sounds like it was recorded in a dungeon in West Philly, far enough away from Drexel so none of their hipster-influence could spoil the ignorant manifestations of these true goregrinders. And for all we know, it was. Oh look at that, Cape Verde almost won me $17. ALMOST!

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Traditional Addictions was produced by Greg Dawson who recorded, mixed and mastered it at BWC Studios in Kingston, Ontario. It’s being independently released on vinyl and digitally on July 24. Place your preorder here.

Two members of the band chimed in regarding the new track:

R.P.: “‘Drug Addict'” is the perfect opening track—a raw, unrelenting representation of addiction. It bites into the vicious cycle of repetition, mirroring the highs and lows you continuously flow in and out of. With a simple story and clear, concise lyrics—where are my drugs, I need my drugs—the track is filled with Easter eggs and a tip of the hat to one of our favorite bands of all time. This is the feel-bad hit of the summer.”

S.S.: “‘Drug Addic’t was primarily R.P.’s lyrics with a few improved studio lines to help send home the message of, ‘I need my drugs.’ This song is the perfect opener: it is a simple, heavy and one-dimensional fixation on the mindset of an addict. I thoroughly enjoyed working with layering vocals and creating soundscapes on this song to help make it sound like a drug-fuelled freak out.”

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