The second full-length album by recluse industrial black metal/harsh noise abusers american (which the band stylizes lowercase). american were one of the earliest ever bands Sentient Ruin records ever worked with back in 2014 (their fourth ever “signing” to be exact), and their debut album Coping With Loss – was a cornerstone point of no return for the label, and probably the first release to make the SR name surface out of complete obscurity, and which first realistically circulated the label’s vision among total strangers for the first time ever.
Hailing from Richmond, Virgina, and with influences ranging from The Body, Leviathan, Ministry, and Skinny Puppy, to Craft, Godlflesh, and Blut Aus Nord, american play a disembodied, torturous and completely fucking annihilated blend of sludge, black metal, industrial, and harsh noise – creating a wall of face-tearing noise that oozes of almost implausible negativity. In recent years the likes of Noisey/Vice have claimed that american’s noisy industrial black metal “takes you into a world of pain”, and makes you “beg to whoever you believe in to kill you”, with CVLT Nation explaining that their music “advocates suicide”, and Invisible Oranges further elaborating that their music “is blessed with a haunting aura thick with loathing”.
Now the band present us with ten new wretched tracks of astonishing sonic abuse that knows no end. A work of absolutely magnificent sonic abhorrence that coerces together the abyssal darkness of black metal bands like Leviathan and Ash Borer, the earth-shaking noise abuse of Bastard Noise and The Body, and the glacial magnificence of blackened noise sound sculptors like Sutekh Hexen, Locrian, and Wold.