Snapped Ankles - 2017 - Come Play the Trees

 

Leaf – BAY 103

Come Play the Trees opens as an invitation, but not necessarily a safe one. Snapped Ankles are welcoming us into a forest where the vegetation has learned to operate synthesizers, the wildlife understands motorik rhythm, and abandoned pieces of urban machinery have begun developing primitive social lives of their own. The title suggests playfulness, and the album is genuinely enormous fun, but there is always a small destabilizing force beneath that welcome. Come closer, dance, surrender to the groove, but remember that the trees have been watching what the city does to everything standing in its way.
Snapped Ankles had already existed for roughly six years before this debut album appeared in 2017. They began at East London warehouse events, performing long grooves beside films, installations, dancers and other artists rather than following an ordinary sequence of rehearsals, support slots and record releases. Their earliest music did not require finished songs. It needed enough rhythmic life to inhabit a room while images, bodies and improvised events developed around it. That history explains why Come Play the Trees feels unusually physical for a studio debut. These tracks were not imagined primarily as recordings. They were organisms that had spent years changing shape in public before being persuaded to fit onto vinyl.
The group’s handmade log synthesizers are not merely stage props created to decorate an otherwise conventional post-punk band. Electronic triggers and simple circuits were attached to rotten pieces of timber so that striking a log could produce a siren, pulse, bass tone or electronic crack. It is an elegant collision of several historical moments: prehistoric percussion, seventies analogue synthesis, punk’s damaged equipment and the modern electronic dance floor. Snapped Ankles reject the idea that new technology must arrive inside clean, expensive boxes. A single oscillator buried in dead wood can be enough to open another world.
That principle extends to the costumes. The musicians perform beneath ghillie-like vegetation, masks and tangled woodland material, turning individual players into one moving hedge. Concealment releases them from the familiar visual hierarchy of singer, guitarist, drummer and personality. Instead of watching identifiable musicians display themselves, an audience encounters a temporary species. The ridiculousness is essential. Snapped Ankles understand that folklore, horror and comedy often share the same roots, and that something can be genuinely unsettling while also looking as though it wandered away from a low-budget children’s television program and survived for several decades in an industrial estate.
The opening title track grows from ritual percussion, electronic buzzing and a repeated vocal summons. Its rhythm seems older than the circuitry producing part of it, as though a village procession has continued into a future where the original instruments have been replaced by salvaged components. Rather than treating nature and electronics as opposites, the band lets them become mutually contaminating. The synthesizer sounds feral; the drums behave mechanically; the voice moves between human command and animal signal. By the time the groove has established itself, the invitation no longer feels metaphorical. The record has constructed a place and begun reorganizing the listener’s movements inside it.
“Hanging With the Moon” condenses that environment into one of the album’s sharpest pop forms. Percussion snaps into place, synthesizer tones buzz around the beat, and the voice moves with the comic urgency of someone trying to deliver important information while being pursued through undergrowth. The song demonstrates how clearly Snapped Ankles understand hooks. Their homemade instruments and conceptual mythology could easily have produced a record admired more for its ingenuity than played for pleasure. Instead, the oddness continually becomes memorable rhythm. A noise that initially appears abrasive returns as a melodic identity; a chant becomes a chorus; a primitive pulse begins operating like dance music.
“I Want My Minutes Back” is an even more concentrated example. The title reduces modern dissatisfaction to a brilliantly petty demand. Money can sometimes be returned, possessions exchanged and apologies offered, but minutes are permanently gone. The song’s relentless forward movement intensifies that joke because the music is consuming time while protesting its theft. Every repetition seems to demand compensation from meetings, waiting rooms, administrative processes, delayed journeys, unwanted conversations and the countless mechanisms through which daily life is shaved into unusable pieces. Yet the groove is too exhilarating to feel defeated. These are minutes the record takes and somehow returns in a more animated condition.
The album reaches its great central clearing with “Jonny Guitar Calling Gosta Berlin,” an eight-minute piece assembled from two earlier versions of the song. One was concise and immediate, while another had expanded after a change in the band’s lineup. Rather than choose between them, Snapped Ankles connected the forms and created an unusually long pop construction whose repeated synthesizer figure keeps discovering new pressure. The title’s cinema references include Johnny Guitar, Greta Garbo’s early film The Saga of Gösta Berling and the band’s fascination with Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, a film in which bourgeois order disintegrates into traffic, violence and surreal social collapse. Snapped Ankles do not recount those films. They use cinema as a second instrument, allowing titles, remembered images and editing methods to influence how the music changes scenes.
The track also carries the group’s warehouse origins into the album more completely than any other. It begins as a recognizable song but keeps stretching until repetition produces the sensation of entering an installation. The beat becomes architectural, the arpeggios become lighting, and the fuzzed guitar appears as a moving object rather than a conventional solo voice. The piece never abandons pleasure while becoming increasingly strange. That balance is difficult to achieve. Experimental music can sometimes announce its intelligence by withholding immediate enjoyment, while pop can disguise every unusual decision beneath reassurance. Snapped Ankles allow both impulses to grow from the same rotten stump.
“Let’s Revel” continues the movement with a darker pulse and lyrics that transform social exhaustion into an invitation to collective disorder. Control becomes harder to maintain, work and unemployment become equally unstable, and revelry appears not as uncomplicated escape but as a temporary technology for surviving pressure. The song’s list of things in which to revel includes alcohol, misery, chemistry, building control and former glory, collapsing celebration and despair into the same chant. The band does not pretend that dancing removes the conditions producing anxiety. Dancing is simply one way a body proves that those conditions have not yet acquired complete ownership of it.
This is where the album’s woodland mythology reveals its urban roots. Come Play the Trees is not pastoral music imagining an innocent countryside untouched by modern life. Its forest grew inside warehouses, cheap artist spaces and threatened cultural communities. The trees represent whatever develops in neglected ground before property interests discover that ground can be monetized. Snapped Ankles’ ecosystem includes performers, filmmakers, dancers, broken equipment, improvised venues and people making substantial experiences from materials considered economically insignificant. Nature reclaiming the city becomes inseparable from art reclaiming a room.
“Tuesday Makes Me Cry” gives that argument an unexpectedly tender form. Monday receives most of modern culture’s hostility, but Tuesday can feel more severe because the week has fully revealed its shape and the weekend is no longer close enough to offer psychological shelter. The track moves with an industrial pulse that treats sadness as a repeating process rather than an isolated emotional event. Electronic sounds flicker around the rhythm while the voice turns an ordinary weekday into something immense and faintly absurd. Snapped Ankles are especially good at locating emotional pressure inside apparently minor details. A whole social system can become visible through one missing minute or one intolerable Tuesday.
“The Invisible Real That Hurts” leans furthest toward angular synth-pop, exposing how much melody has been hiding inside the album’s rough surfaces. Its title suggests forces that cannot be touched directly but nevertheless organize physical life: money, rent, time, expectation, bureaucracy, social status, anxiety and the private measurements through which people decide whether they are succeeding or failing. The invisible real is not less powerful because it cannot be held. It may be more powerful because it enters thought disguised as reality’s natural shape. The song converts that abstract discomfort into a bright, restless arrangement whose pop clarity makes the underlying unease easier to carry.
There is a wonderful contradiction in learning that the album’s working title was reportedly 20 Attempts at a Christmas Number One. Beneath the masks, log synthesizers, film experiments and pagan vegetation is a band that deeply respects the democratic power of a memorable song. Snapped Ankles are not using experimentation to escape pop. They are trying to discover how many unusual materials pop can digest without losing its ability to reach strangers. Their hooks are branches extended from unfamiliar trees.
“True Ecology” brings the album’s artistic philosophy into its clearest focus. Ecology here does not mean an untouched green landscape separated from human contamination. It means the entire network of waste, growth, habitation, reuse and exchange. Trash becomes an instrument, a warehouse becomes a cultural habitat, dead timber becomes electronic equipment, and discarded ideas acquire another life through collective play. Nothing exists alone, including the band. Every sound depends upon places, friendships, old technologies, films, previous musical movements and the listeners who complete the circuit.
One of Snapped Ankles’ most revealing inspirations for this idea was Ferdinand Cheval, the French rural postman who spent thirty-three years constructing his Palais Idéal from stones encountered during his rounds. Cheval gathered what the landscape placed along his daily route and slowly converted those overlooked fragments into a private architecture unlike anything sanctioned by conventional education or professional culture. Snapped Ankles recognized their own method in his example: picking up bits, carrying them home and continuing until the collection becomes a world. That connection reaches much deeper than a colorful piece of band trivia. It places repetition, manual labor, scavenging and imagination inside the same creative process.
Cheval’s palace and Come Play the Trees both demonstrate how an accumulated practice can become larger than any original plan. A single stone is not a palace, one oscillator is not an album, and one warehouse jam is not a musical identity. Meaning develops through return. The maker walks another route, finds another fragment, repeats another rhythm and adds another unlikely piece to the structure. Outsider creation is often described as though it appears suddenly from pure private inspiration, but both the postman and the band reveal its actual machinery: attention sustained across years.
The closing “Come Play the Trees Outro” does not supply a conventional resolution. It loosens the record back into its environment, allowing the invitation from the beginning to remain open after the songs have ended. The album has travelled from ritual to pop, cinema, social pressure, invisible systems and ecological reuse, yet everything still belongs to the same habitat. The outro feels like the band retreating into vegetation while leaving its equipment switched on. Human activity disappears first; the pulse continues.
Danalogue, also known as Dan Leavers of The Comet Is Coming and Soccer96, produced and mixed the album. His role was especially important because Snapped Ankles’ force had developed through unstable live performances, improvised “log jams” and songs whose forms could expand or contract according to the space. The production gives those ideas enough definition to survive repeated listening without disinfecting them. Bass and drums remain bodily, synthesizers retain their cracked surfaces, and the vocals are clear enough to carry language while never becoming too detached from the collective noise. Pete Fletcher’s mastering similarly preserves the album’s impact without ironing its bark flat.
Released by The Leaf Label in September 2017, Come Play the Trees appeared on CD, black vinyl and a transparent-yellow LP edition limited to three hundred copies. The label was almost suspiciously perfect for musicians presenting themselves as woodland messengers, but the relationship mattered beyond the botanical joke. After years of self-directed performances and recordings that could easily disappear into the enormous reservoir of unheard music, Leaf gave the group a structure through which its carefully cultivated strangeness could travel outward without being translated into something ordinary.
Come Play the Trees is therefore a debut only in the commercial sense. It carries years of rooms, costumes, failed experiments, altered lineups, handmade circuits and elastic performances within it. The album sounds confident because Snapped Ankles had already built a complete method before arriving at the point where a larger audience could hear it. They did not manufacture a visual identity to accompany finished songs. The songs, costumes, instruments, films and performance spaces had grown around one another until separating them became impossible.
What might initially look like a band using a woodland gimmick is ultimately a sophisticated argument about creation. Technology is not inherently sterile. Nature is not inherently peaceful. Pop does not require expensive equipment. Anonymity can produce freedom rather than absence. Waste can retain possibility. A group can make serious observations while remaining funny, and an invitation to play can also be an invitation to resist. Snapped Ankles enter dressed as the forgotten edge of the landscape and reveal that the edge may be where the future is quietly assembling itself.
Anyone who encountered the early warehouse performances, the log synthesizers in person, the Total Refreshment Centre community or the different versions of “Jonny Guitar Calling Gosta Berlin” is invited to leave another branch of the story. This album presents a complete forest, but forests become more interesting when people identify the strange things growing inside them.

Gauntlet Ring - 2023 - Beyond The Veil Of The Night

Blood And Crescent – CRESCENT-005

 Beyond the Veil of the Night begins with no desire to introduce black metal as a renovated contemporary art form. Gauntlet Ring enters as though the essential machinery was perfected decades ago and merely needed to be restarted: guitars scraped into a freezing melodic blur, drums striking with uncomplicated force, bass thickening the march beneath them, keyboards appearing as distant weather, and voices arriving from somewhere behind the entire formation. Yet this loyalty to an older language does not make the album inert. Taurus and Mercenary understand that tradition becomes alive through conviction. The record works because they do not approach raw black metal as a costume assembled from recognizable historical details. They behave as though this music remains an immediate necessity.

The New York duo formed in 2020 and produced an unusually concentrated series of demos, albums and related projects during the years that followed. Beyond the Veil of the Night was already their third full-length, arriving after Upon the Wings of the Black Eagle and Tyrannical Bloodlust. That rapid movement might suggest music poured out before it could be examined, but this album reveals an increasing command of scale. Earlier Gauntlet Ring recordings often attacked through shorter, sharper compositions. Here, most of the principal songs are given five to seven minutes, allowing the riffs to circle, accumulate atmosphere and develop the hallucinatory persistence required by the album’s title.
“Visions of a Midnight Hour” establishes the record through repetition rather than theatrical scene-setting. Gauntlet Ring does not require a long dungeon introduction to prove that darkness has arrived. The guitars immediately construct it. Melodic phrases rise through the coarse production, vanish beneath the percussion and return slightly altered by memory. The sound is raw, but its elements are not accidentally obscured. The abrasion becomes a veil through which the melodic shape must be perceived. What initially seems like a wall gradually separates into layers, and the listening act becomes a movement through them.
This is one of the record’s most important qualities. Raw production is often discussed as though it were merely a reduction of information: fewer frequencies, less clarity, less studio refinement. Gauntlet Ring uses it to produce additional imaginative space. Because every contour is not brightly exposed, the listener completes portions of the music internally. A keyboard line can resemble moonlight, distant horns or cold air passing through an opening because its exact physical source is withheld. The record does not provide a detailed illustration of its world. It supplies enough shadow for the mind to begin building one.
“A Mist of Blood and Battle” introduces the album’s martial vocabulary without settling into the polished heroism of conventional epic metal. The battle is not witnessed from a hilltop by someone admiring organized armies. It is entered at ground level, where direction has become uncertain and grandeur is mixed with exhaustion, mud and panic. The guitars retain a triumphant upward reach, but the recording continually damages that triumph. Melody and ugliness occupy the same body. Gauntlet Ring’s imagined warrior does not ride through a spotless fantasy painting. He staggers through a world whose heroic ideals are already dissolving into mist.
This distinction prevents the album’s swords, stars, blood and winter from becoming harmless fantasy decoration. Gauntlet Ring uses such images as containers for emotional states: isolation, hostility, endurance, longing and the wish to step outside a modern world experienced as spiritually flattened. The music does not ask whether medieval battle was historically glorious. It constructs an interior mythology in which armor, night and frozen landscapes provide forms for feelings that ordinary contemporary language has difficulty carrying. Black metal has always understood that an invented past can reveal something real about the present, even when the invention is deliberately excessive.
“Winter’s Dreams,” the first of two instrumentals, interrupts the campaign after more than twelve minutes of sustained attack. At only a minute and a half, it behaves like a small passage rather than a separate destination. The shift is valuable because it demonstrates that Gauntlet Ring’s atmosphere does not depend entirely upon distortion and screaming. The dream is created from the same limited materials, but their relationship changes. The album briefly turns inward, allowing its frost to become contemplative before “Soldiers of the Starless Sky” restores the physical movement.
That title contains the album’s mythology in miniature. A soldier ordinarily navigates by visible landmarks, commands, banners or stars. These soldiers advance beneath a sky offering no such guidance. Their loyalty is therefore directed toward something invisible, forgotten or perhaps nonexistent. The song’s repeated motion suits that condition. Gauntlet Ring’s riffs often appear to travel forcefully without reaching a final destination, creating the sensation of disciplined movement through immeasurable darkness. This is music about direction performed without reassurance.
Mercenary’s drumming is crucial to the effect. The percussion does not compete with the guitars through elaborate technical display. It establishes the ground upon which their melodies can appear larger than life. Blasts, direct beats and martial accents create a firm physical outline while Taurus’s guitar smears around it. Mercenary’s bass performs a similarly structural role, reinforcing the movement rather than demanding a separate spotlight. The duo’s division of labor is exceptionally efficient: one musician generates the storm and its disembodied voices, while the other makes certain the storm continues travelling.
“Steel Screams of Honor” opens the second half with the album’s central contradiction already present in its name. Steel does not scream, and honor cannot be heard, but black metal regularly gives physical voice to abstract principles. Here the guitar becomes both weapon and lament. Its higher lines carry something close to traditional heavy metal grandeur, while the production refuses the clean separation and muscular certainty usually associated with that tradition. The result is heroic music heard through damage, as though an old victory song has survived on a tape left outdoors for several winters.
This damaged grandeur connects Gauntlet Ring to several black metal histories at once. The album carries the solitary, crackling severity associated with Judas Iscariot, the romantic and unstable melodic sweep of the Blazebirth Hall orbit, and the proud martial movement heard across portions of Polish and Eastern European black metal. The value lies not in identifying which passage resembles which earlier band. Those traditions have become part of the duo’s instinctive vocabulary. Gauntlet Ring selects the emotional function of those sounds, then recombines them inside its own compact mythology.
“Beneath the Pendant of the Sun” briefly introduces warmth into a record dominated by night and winter, but the sun appears not as an open sky or a source of everyday comfort. It is a pendant, an emblem worn or suspended, perhaps a distant symbol of power rather than the power itself. This is characteristic of the album’s language. Natural objects become heraldic signs: the starless sky, the sun, frost, blood and night are arranged like symbols upon shields. Gauntlet Ring creates a private cosmology from a deliberately restricted vocabulary, and repetition gives those few images increasing weight.
The seven-minute “Frosty Blood of Winter” is the album’s longest composition and its natural summit. The title fuses landscape and body until the distinction between them disappears. Winter enters the blood; blood stains the winter. The extended duration permits Gauntlet Ring’s melodic method to work at full depth. A riff does not need to transform constantly when its purpose is to alter the listener’s surroundings. Repetition slowly removes the phrase from ordinary musical measurement. After enough returns, it no longer feels like a sequence of notes being played by a guitarist. It becomes the law governing the landscape.
This is where the album reveals its relationship to trance. Its imagery may be violent, but much of its actual effect is meditative. The direct percussion, limited harmonic vocabulary and recurring guitar figures narrow attention until small changes acquire enormous importance. A chord lifting slightly upward can feel like a gate opening. A keyboard entering behind the guitar can expand a small recording into an immense chamber. A change in drum emphasis can turn a march into a charge. Gauntlet Ring’s apparent primitivism is therefore not an absence of compositional thought. It is a method of magnifying a few carefully chosen events.
“Eventide Primitivism” closes the record instrumentally, giving a name to the aesthetic that has governed everything preceding it. Eventide is the approach of evening, the transitional hour in which familiar objects lose detail and begin resembling unknown forms. Primitivism suggests reduction, instinct and the rejection of unnecessary complication. Together the words describe Gauntlet Ring’s music with unusual precision. The duo reduces black metal to fundamental gestures, then places those gestures in the uncertain light between visibility and darkness.
Ending with an instrumental also prevents the record from concluding through a final lyrical declaration. The warriors, blood, stars and emblems withdraw, leaving only the environment that produced them. This makes the album feel cyclical. “Eventide Primitivism” could be the fading aftermath of “Frosty Blood of Winter,” but it could equally be the landscape before “Visions of a Midnight Hour” begins. The veil never lifts completely. Night is not an event with a clear beginning and conclusion; it is the surrounding condition from which the songs temporarily become visible.
Taurus handles guitars, vocals and synthesizers, while Mercenary supplies bass, drums and additional invocations. Both musicians are credited with writing, recording and mixing the album, and that enclosed production method is essential to its character. Beyond the Veil of the Night does not sound like musicians presenting material to an outside studio professional for correction. It sounds like two people determining the laws of a world and then sealing the doors behind them. The limited personnel and self-contained recording preserve the sense that the listener has intercepted something not originally intended for broad public explanation.
Blood and Crescent’s presentation reinforced this isolation. The album appeared as CRESCENT-005 in a limited vinyl edition, followed by a CD, circulating through a small international network of labels, distros, collectors and uploads rather than conventional promotion. In an era when nearly every new recording is expected to arrive accompanied by biographies, social accounts, interviews, visual content and continuous accessibility, Gauntlet Ring retains the older black metal pleasure of incomplete information. The record exists before the personalities behind it can explain it away.
That obscurity can become its own form of marketing, but Gauntlet Ring survives the danger because the music contains genuine melodic substance. Remove the scarcity, anonymity and cult presentation, and the riffs remain. The songs possess enough movement to be remembered after their atmosphere has dispersed. Beyond the Veil of the Night is not valuable merely because it resembles a mysterious artifact. It repeatedly earns the aura surrounding it.
The album also demonstrates that backward-looking music does not have to be creatively dead. Innovation is not limited to introducing unfamiliar technology, hybridizing genres or breaking every inherited rule. A musician can create new meaning by entering an established form with unusual depth of belief. Gauntlet Ring’s achievement is not the invention of another black metal vocabulary. It is the restoration of urgency to one that could easily have become ceremonial and empty.
Across thirty-nine minutes, Beyond the Veil of the Night converts modest means into an internally complete world. Two musicians, a handful of instruments, eight tracks and an intentionally rough recording become blood mist, starless armies, frozen dreams and the final dimming of evening. Nothing here requires literal belief in the fantasy. The music’s deeper subject is the human capacity to construct meaning under darkness, to keep marching when the sky provides no coordinates, and to transform isolation into a sound another isolated person might recognize.
Anyone with information about the original vinyl edition, the recording process, the Blood and Crescent network or differences between the LP and later CD is invited to add it. Gauntlet Ring leaves considerable darkness around its work, and sometimes the listeners carrying scattered pieces of the record’s history become the only lanterns available.

Breathilizor / Geile Diebe - 2021 - Satanic Mathematical Calculations From The Demonoid Dimension Of Gurgletron Eleven / Schwedisch Amerikanische Freundschaft

Wheelchair Full Of Old Men – WC674

 There are album titles that summarize the music, album titles that decorate it, and then there is Satanic Mathematical Calculations From the Demonoid Dimension of Gurgletron Eleven / Schwedisch Amerikanische Freundschaft, a title so overdeveloped that it begins behaving like an additional member of the band. Before the needle has touched the record, Breathilizör and Geile Diebe have already established the governing principle: every familiar gesture will be pushed slightly too far, seriousness will be allowed to inflate until it squeaks, and the supposed distinction between stupidity and intelligence will be treated as suspicious propaganda.

This split works because its comedy is embedded in the music rather than placed on top of it. Breathilizör does not merely play metal and attach ridiculous song titles afterward. The band understands how heavy music manufactures authority through ominous names, technical vocabulary, mythological creatures, death imagery and the suggestion that every riff has arrived carrying forbidden knowledge. Breathilizör keeps the machinery but replaces its sacred contents with spilled lima beans, murderous clowns, Gerald Ford’s corpse and a dimension called Gurgletron Eleven. The grandeur remains intact long enough for the absurdity to crawl inside it.
“Park of Horrible Spilled Lima Beans” is an ideal opening statement because its title joins domestic inconvenience to apocalyptic horror. A few overturned vegetables become a contaminated landscape through nothing more than the language normally reserved for underground metal cosmology. That transformation is funny, but it also reveals how titles instruct the ear. Call a piece “The Eternal Crypt of the Horned Necromancer” and listeners will search the guitars for darkness; call it “Park of Horrible Spilled Lima Beans” and the same dramatic weight becomes comic theater. Breathilizör exposes that mechanism without needing to stop enjoying it.
This is an important distinction. Parody made by people who dislike its subject usually grows thin after the original joke has been recognized. Breathilizör sounds closer to musicians who know the pleasures of primitive thrash, punky metal and basement horror well enough to exaggerate them affectionately. The riffs still need to move. The drums still need to push. The voices still need to sound as though a badly secured portal has opened beside the microphone. The comedy does not excuse weak music; it changes the atmosphere in which roughness, repetition and amateur excess are understood.
“Bats of Cthulhu” demonstrates the band’s talent for combining two pieces of ready-made darkness that become sillier when joined. Bats already carry an entire warehouse of heavy-metal symbolism, while H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu has been repeatedly recruited into music, games, shirts, tattoos and every imaginable form of tentacled merchandise. Breathilizör does not attempt to rescue either image from overuse. It piles them together and allows cultural exhaustion itself to become material. The monster is frightening, but it has also worked too many conventions.
“Gun of Loch Ness Monster” performs another useful grammatical collision. Is it a gun owned by the Loch Ness Monster, a gun designed to kill the Loch Ness Monster, or a weapon made from some portion of the creature? Breathilizör leaves the engineering unexplained. What matters is the sudden cooperation between folkloric mystery and action-film hardware. Much of the band’s world operates through this childlike freedom, not childish in the sense of being undeveloped, but in the older creative sense of refusing to accept that categories must remain where adults have placed them.
“Fife of Destruction” may contain the funniest scale problem on the side. Metal normally demands swords, axes, cannons, thunder and armies, while a fife suggests a small, piercing instrument leading troops through a historical reenactment. Giving it destructive power transforms it into an occult device. This is how Breathilizör’s humor accumulates: ordinary objects are promoted beyond their competence, while terrifying entities are made to deal with food, obsolete politicians and cheap entertainment. Everything is reassigned to the wrong department.
“Clown of Doom” belongs to a longer meeting point between genuine fear and shabby spectacle. Clowns are already unstable figures, expected to create joy while using artificial faces, exaggerated bodies and behavior that ignores normal social distance. Add doom and the result is not entirely a joke. The phrase could describe bargain-bin horror, professional wrestling, a forgotten regional haunted house or a real psychic condition produced by being trapped at a party with an entertainer who will not stop. Breathilizör repeatedly discovers that absurdity and dread are neighboring properties with a broken fence between them.
“Land of the Lost” briefly appears almost respectable because it carries the name of an actual television fantasy world, but within this sequence even recognizable culture is absorbed into the band’s private mythology. Saturday-morning dinosaurs, dimensional portals and cheap special effects belong naturally beside death-metal language because both forms ask the audience to complete an incomplete illusion. Neither requires perfect realism. A rubber creature, a distorted guitar and a painted backdrop can all become enormous when the participant agrees to meet them halfway.
The side ends with “Corpse of Gerald Ford,” bringing its cosmic nonsense abruptly into American history. Ford is an especially peculiar choice because he occupies a less theatrically mythologized place in popular memory than many presidents. That ordinariness makes his appearance among Cthulhu, monsters and doomed clowns more effective. The song title does not explain whether the former president has become a relic, ingredient, zombie or accidental object discovered in Gurgletron Eleven. He is simply there, the final bureaucratic body washed ashore by the side’s flood of horror-comedy.
Breathilizör’s personnel reinforce the sense of a small, enclosed workshop generating a disproportionately elaborate universe. Food Fortunata and Poopy Necroponde bring with them a web of connections to Sockeye, Sloth, Cauliflower Ass and Bob, Doktor Bitch, Zitsquatch and numerous other projects where punk, metal, home recording, grotesque humor and deliberate overproduction of ideas repeatedly overlap. This is less a conventional band career than a continuously branching folk art. New names appear because one container cannot hold every joke, sound or invented identity.
Geile Diebe takes the second side in a more recognizably punk direction, but the transition does not lead from comedy into seriousness. It changes the method of sabotage. Where Breathilizör inflates metal imagery until it becomes cartoon architecture, Geile Diebe works with short songs, familiar titles, damaged pop memory and a looser sense that any recognizable piece of culture can be disassembled and incorrectly rebuilt. The difference gives the split actual shape. These are not two interchangeable bands sharing plastic; they are two dialects of purposeful wrongness.
The name Geile Diebe can carry several shades of German slang, from “horny thieves” to something closer to “cool” or “awesome thieves,” depending on tone and context. The side title Schwedisch Amerikanische Freundschaft means Swedish-American Friendship and plainly bends the name of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft into another nationality. The joke arrives wearing the austere uniform of European electronic music, then immediately fails to behave with suitable dignity. Even before the first track, the band is already stealing identities and returning them with altered paperwork.
“One Day” and “You’re a Prisoner” establish the second side through titles that could have appeared on dozens of forgotten punk singles. Their plainness becomes a counterweight to Breathilizör’s overloaded fantasy language. Geile Diebe does not need an interdimensional monster when an ordinary day or the recognition of confinement can provide sufficient material. Punk has always understood that a short declarative phrase can become enormous when repeated by people who mean it, even when the recording surrounding it sounds unstable, sarcastic or intentionally under-rehearsed.
“Purple Haze” is where the project’s approach to cultural theft becomes especially clear. The music acknowledges the famous song, but contemporary descriptions note that the result is not exactly a cover beyond that borrowed musical foundation. This is less tribute than occupation. Geile Diebe enters a monument everybody recognizes, moves the furniture, writes on the walls and refuses to provide the expected tour. The famous title becomes communal scrap material rather than an artifact protected behind velvet rope.
That method belongs to a deep underground tradition. Punk covers are often most revealing when they misunderstand, mistreat or deliberately reduce their sources. Technical faithfulness can preserve a song’s surface while missing its social life. A cheap, incorrect version may expose the riff as something capable of surviving outside its original ownership. Geile Diebe treats recognition as a trapdoor. The listener identifies the object, then discovers that the expected contents have been removed.
“The Pain Isn’t Over” is almost startlingly direct among the surrounding nonsense. Its title admits a condition that much humorous music quietly conceals: comedy and pain are not opposites. Absurdity often develops because ordinary language has become inadequate or intolerably solemn. A ridiculous band name, a cheap recording and a mangled cover can carry real frustration without converting it into confession. The joke creates enough distance for unpleasant information to pass through.
Then comes “Fanged Rainbows of Flying Tongue Clouds, Meat Grucks,” whose title appears to have escaped from the same damaged cosmology as Gurgletron Eleven. At four and a half minutes, it is also the longest track on the Geile Diebe side, giving the nonsense room to expand into a central structure rather than a quick interruption. Fangs, rainbows, tongues, clouds and meat are forced into one sentence until language begins generating creatures faster than the imagination can stabilize them. “Grucks” may not need a definition. The word already sounds unpleasantly tangible.
“Can’t Happen Here” uses one of the oldest reassurances in political and social life, the belief that catastrophe belongs somewhere else, to another nation, another era or people less protected by normality. Whether the title is operating as quotation, cover reference or simple phrase, its presence among this record’s deliberate foolishness gives it additional force. Comedy becomes a way of testing the walls of certainty. The strangest events do happen here. They merely acquire respectable names afterward.
“Go Your Own Way” again presents a title burdened with enormous pop recognition, but Geile Diebe’s compact running time immediately warns against expecting the polished emotional architecture associated with it. The song lasts barely a minute and a half. Whatever road is being offered, the band travels it quickly, without luggage and possibly in the wrong vehicle. This compression is one of punk’s great editing tools. A cultural object that once occupied a grand stage can be reduced to a few urgent gestures and returned to circulation.
“Things I Am” and “One Way” complete the record with language stripped almost to signs. The titles resemble fragments found on protest buttons, diary pages or damaged singles whose larger stories have disappeared. After forty minutes of monsters, corpses, imprisonment, pain, parody and stolen musical memory, these final phrases feel strangely open. Identity remains plural, but direction narrows. There are things one is, and there may be only one way left to proceed.
The split’s cover makes the same argument visually. Two obscured figures hover above a dense hand-drawn territory of animals, machinery, signs, speech fragments and cellular clutter, all reproduced through the gray weather of photocopy culture. It refuses the clean separation between professional artwork and marginal doodling. The central drawing looks less designed than inhabited, a place where every available blank area has attracted another creature or thought. The packaging does not translate the music into a marketable symbol. It continues the music by other means.
Wheelchair Full of Old Men is an ideal home for such an object because the label’s presentation rejects nearly every ritual of prestige. Its Bandcamp navigation offers “Crap to hear,” “Crap to buy” and “What?” instead of the polished language through which labels normally certify their own importance. That self-deprecation is not a confession that the work lacks value. It is a defense against the idea that value must be granted by professionalism, scarcity theater, critical approval or respectable taste.
There is a meaningful difference between carelessness and anti-perfection. Carelessness loses interest in the object; anti-perfection remains deeply interested while refusing to erase evidence of the hands that made it. This split belongs to the second category. Sixteen tracks, two fully developed aliases, separate side titles, a crowded cover, a lyric and information sheet, a numbered catalog identity and a vinyl pressing of fewer than three hundred copies require real labor. The joke is not that nobody cared. The joke is that so much care was devoted to something determined to look disreputable.
That approach links the record to zines, cassette culture, mail-order catalogs and the countless private universes created by people whose output exceeds the permission granted by ordinary cultural institutions. One project becomes five bands; one joke becomes an LP; one drawing becomes a sleeve; one pressing enters collections and radio libraries far from its origin. None of this needs to become famous to become real. The object has already succeeded once it begins connecting strangers who recognize its frequency.
The limited edition of 248 copies makes each surviving record a tiny physical witness to this network. Scarcity here feels less like luxury marketing than the practical scale at which an eccentric idea could be manufactured. Two hundred forty-eight is neither an audience of millions nor a private room. It is a peculiar little population, large enough for the record to travel and small enough that every copy retains the feeling of an object someone had to pack, address and send.
Satanic Mathematical Calculations From the Demonoid Dimension of Gurgletron Eleven / Schwedisch Amerikanische Freundschaft ultimately turns bad taste into a workshop. Metal pomposity, punk bluntness, television memories, famous riffs, German phrasing, American presidents, monsters, vegetables and hand-drawn clutter are all treated as available components. Nothing is too sacred to alter and nothing is too foolish to preserve.
The record’s deepest pleasure may be its refusal to distinguish between the grand imagination and the stupid idea. Gurgletron Eleven is ridiculous, but somebody still had to discover it, map its demonoid mathematics and return with seven songs. Geile Diebe’s cultural thefts are crude, but they reveal how songs continue living after correct ownership and faithful interpretation have stopped being interesting. Together the two sides construct a complete philosophy of underground creation: take whatever is nearby, misunderstand it productively, give the result an unnecessarily long name and press it onto vinyl before sensible people can intervene.
Anyone who knows the hidden personnel behind Geile Diebe, the recording circumstances, the sources being dismantled across the second side or the story behind the sleeve should add another piece. This is exactly the kind of record whose full history may be distributed among inserts, old messages, mail-order packages and the memories of the 248 people who unexpectedly became custodians of Gurgletron Eleven.

Civilistjävel! – Fyra Platser

FELT – FELT004

Fyra platser translates simply as “Four Places,” but Civilistjävel! does not treat those places as destinations to be described. There are no scenic introductions, explanatory field recordings or musical equivalents of photographs taken from a marked viewpoint. The four names function more like coordinates stored inside a private memory system. Each track establishes a climate, pressure and distance around its location, allowing geography to become emotional without translating it into a conventional story. This is music about where something happened, or where somebody once existed, after most of the details have become impossible to retrieve.
Three of the locations, Sebäng, Kolugn and Valmsta, belong to the Nordingrå area of Sweden’s High Coast. Louhivesi shifts the map into Finland, with Athens also passing through the memories that shaped the collaboration. The record was dedicated to Civilistjävel!’s grandmother, which quietly changes the meaning of its title. These are not four arbitrary place names selected for their sound. They appear to be points in a family geography, pieces of land carrying information that cannot be written fully into liner notes. The EP behaves like a memorial built without portraits, dates or biographical explanation. Place itself becomes the surviving witness.
That regional connection reaches all the way into the project’s name. Civilistjävel! means approximately “civilian bastard,” an insult directed by the military toward civilians in Bo Widerberg’s film Ådalen 31. The film dramatizes the 1931 killing of striking workers by Swedish troops in Ådalen, the same broader part of northern Sweden from which Tomas Bodén comes. His alias therefore contains a piece of regional labor history before any music begins. It names the civilian as seen by armed authority, while the records repeatedly return dignity, interior life and mystery to people and places that official history might reduce to background.
This does not make Fyra platser an explicitly political record, but it prevents its landscape from becoming neutral decoration. The High Coast is beautiful, yet beauty here contains industry, family movement, class history, disappearance and inherited memory. A place is never only its cliffs, forests and water. It is also the labor performed there, the people who departed, the people who stayed and the names that continue circulating after individual lives have ended. Civilistjävel! does not explain those layers. He lets them remain compressed inside low frequencies and partially obscured tones.
The project originally emerged through recordings made during the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, material that sat unheard until connections with Kiran Sande and Low Company finally brought it into circulation. That history matters because Civilistjävel!’s music often sounds as though it has already spent years somewhere before reaching us. Even newer recordings carry the emotional condition of archived sound. They seem retrieved rather than announced, arriving with their surfaces slightly clouded by storage, memory and the uncertainty of when the present actually began.
Bodén has spoken about finding energy in the aftermath of snowstorms on the High Coast, when the temperature falls, the sky clears and the landscape becomes intensely white. He has also described enjoying inexpensive musical equipment that other people overlook. Both details provide useful entrances into Fyra platser. The record achieves an enormous sense of space without requiring enormous gestures, and its materials rarely advertise technical prestige. Modest pulses, drones, static, damaged percussion and a small number of sustained tones are arranged until they seem capable of holding an entire terrain.
The preceding Järnnätter retained a stronger connection to dub techno, using cyclical rhythm and depth as architectural forces. Fyra platser moves farther into the region between beat and beatlessness. Rhythm has not disappeared, but it often exists beneath the music like a road covered by snowfall. The listener can still follow its direction, though its edges have softened and occasionally vanish. This creates a peculiar sense of motion. The four pieces travel, but so slowly that movement is registered primarily through changing atmosphere.
“Sebäng,” the shortest track, acts as the record’s first act of placement. Its comparatively tangible structure gives the ear something to stand upon before the longer pieces begin dissolving the distinction between foreground and distance. Civilistjävel! rarely introduces sounds with the drama of an event. Elements appear as though they were already present and the listener has only just become sensitive enough to detect them. A pulse does not begin so much as emerge from beneath surrounding grain. Tone becomes visible inside noise, then retreats before it can be examined completely.
This gives the music a low-resolution quality that has nothing to do with carelessness. High resolution promises that every surface can be enlarged, identified and made available. Memory does not work that way. Certain details remain vivid while the surrounding context disappears. A room may be gone except for the sound of its heating system; a road may survive through the quality of its winter light; a relative’s entire presence may become concentrated inside one ordinary phrase. Fyra platser uses partial information as a truthful medium. What cannot be recovered is allowed to remain missing.
“Louhivesi” introduces the human voice, but it does not suddenly make the record easier to interpret. Cucina Povera, the project of Karelian-Luxembourgish artist Maria Rossi, brings a vocal presence that feels at once intimate and geographically distant. Rossi’s own work frequently uses voice, field recording and inexpensive equipment to reveal mysticism inside everyday materials. That method fits naturally beside Civilistjävel!’s ability to enlarge a small electronic gesture until it appears to contain weather.
Cucina Povera’s relationship with Karelian singing traditions adds another invisible layer. Rossi has discussed the communal work songs associated with land, animals and repetitive labor, music whose hypnotic harmonies helped people move through recurring physical tasks together. “Louhivesi” does not reproduce one of those songs as an ethnographic quotation, but the relationship between repetition, voice and place remains present. The vocal does not stand over the electronics as a featured performance. It travels through them, becoming another form of atmosphere and another carrier of memory.
The composition surrounds that voice with distorted percussion, bent flute-like tones and deep reverb. Everything moves at a tempo so slow that trip-hop appears to have entered geological time. The recurring structure feels caught inside itself, but this is not stagnation. Each return slightly changes the apparent distance of the voice. At one moment Rossi seems close enough to occupy the same room; a few seconds later the reverberation places her across water, inside a building or years away.
The track’s source imagery reportedly involved Finnish geography, Athens café conversations and hazy photographic memories. These elements do not assemble into a travel diary. Finland and Athens coexist through the private logic of recollection, where two distant locations can touch because one person, sentence or sensation connected them. “Louhivesi” becomes the EP’s hinge because it makes this process audible. A human voice passes through the map and suddenly the four places no longer feel empty. They contain movement between lives.
The lyrics may be difficult or impossible for many listeners to understand, but that uncertainty strengthens the composition. A voice can carry information beyond language through breath, hesitation, repetition and the shape of a vowel held inside reverberation. The inability to translate every word prevents the singer from being reduced to a message. Rossi remains a person and a sound simultaneously, present without becoming fully available. This resembles the way family memory often survives through phrases whose original context has vanished.
“Kolugn” returns to a more severe form of abstraction. The name identifies another location in Nordingrå, but in Swedish the word can also mean completely or utterly calm. The track tests that word until calmness becomes ambiguous. Calm can mean peace, but it can also describe pressure held in perfect balance, a room so still that the smallest crackle acquires threatening significance. Civilistjävel! creates that second condition. The music does not move toward an explosion, yet the possibility of one appears to inhabit every sustained tone.
Overdriven synthesizer layers fluctuate against one another while tiny surface noises remain audible underneath. The piece has been compared with Robert Rutman’s vast metal resonances and with seventies Berlin electronic music, but it does not reproduce either tradition cleanly. Its tones possess the scale of monumental drone while retaining the discoloration of an old private recording. Grandeur is heard through dust. Instead of raising a polished electronic cathedral, “Kolugn” leaves the walls unfinished so that wind, static and structural vibration can enter.
The track’s long duration allows sound to stop behaving as a sequence of musical decisions and become a condition inside the room. At first the listener examines the drone. Gradually the relationship reverses, and the drone appears to be examining the listener. This is one of Civilistjävel!’s most powerful methods. Repetition does not hypnotize by making consciousness disappear. It holds consciousness still long enough for previously unnoticed details, memories and associations to become active.
There is also a quiet linguistic pleasure in placing a location named Kolugn inside music committed to extreme restraint. Place name and descriptive word overlap, but neither explains the other completely. The calmness is grainy, overdriven and faintly unstable. Perhaps true stillness is not the absence of internal activity. It is the point at which numerous movements temporarily cancel one another out, creating a surface that looks motionless while pressure continues underneath.
“Valmsta” closes the record with its most bodily pulse. A kick appears at intervals resembling a heartbeat, steady enough to provide orientation but unstable enough to avoid becoming comfortable. Static and synthesizer tones gather around it while small disturbances pass through the larger structure. The beat does not command the music in the manner of club techno. It confirms that something remains alive inside the landscape.
That heartbeat is especially effective after the disembodied suspension of “Kolugn.” Fyra platser begins by locating the listener, introduces another voice, removes nearly every human outline and then ends by restoring the simplest possible evidence of bodily existence. The final rhythm does not resolve the record’s mysteries. It only keeps time beside them. Memory cannot recover the dead or return a vanished place to its earlier condition, but it can produce another pulse in response.
The High Coast itself provides an extraordinary physical metaphor for this music. The region continues rising as the land slowly rebounds from the immense weight of Ice Age glaciers. Ground that appears permanent is still moving, and the relationship between land and water changes by degrees too small to perceive during an ordinary visit. Fyra platser behaves in a similar way. Its changes can be so gradual that they seem absent, yet by the end of a piece the entire emotional elevation has shifted.
This makes the record less a map of fixed places than a study of places changing under the pressure of time. Roads alter, buildings disappear, shorelines move, relatives die and names remain attached to locations whose meaning has been transformed. Electronic music is especially suited to this subject because it can sustain sounds beyond ordinary instrumental breath, allowing changes to occur at nearly environmental speed. Civilistjävel! does not imitate the landscape’s appearance. He borrows its timescale.
The grandmother dedication gives the EP’s restraint an ethical dimension. Memorial art can sometimes overwhelm its subject with the maker’s own grief, converting a private person into a dramatic public symbol. Fyra platser does the opposite. It protects what is private. No listener is given enough information to claim knowledge of the relationship, yet the care invested in these sounds confirms that the relationship mattered. The four place names become markers whose full meanings remain within the family, while the music permits strangers to recognize the experience of carrying their own private geography.
This is why “Louhivesi” feels so powerful without disrupting the record’s reserve. The voice does not reveal the hidden story, but it introduces vulnerability into an environment that might otherwise seem self-contained. Its arrival suggests that memory is not only stored in land and objects. It is transmitted between people, altered through collaboration and sometimes carried by a language another person cannot understand. A place belonging to one life can enter someone else’s music and become newly inhabited.
The 12-inch format suits the project beautifully. Four moderately sized compositions occupy a physical object whose surface must be divided and turned. The record resembles a compact atlas with two locations on each side. Its printed sleeve, risograph insert and associated poster extend the music’s interest in partial images, grain and reproduction. Risograph printing carries visible texture and slight irregularity, qualities that correspond naturally with sound whose details seem to drift at the edge of definition.
Fergus Jones designed the release, Rebecka Holmström created the label design and Jenny Vinterqvist made the video for “Louhivesi.” These contributions keep the object from appearing as the expression of one isolated producer alone. Like the collaboration with Cucina Povera, they turn private memory into a small network of responses. One person supplies the locations, another voice enters one of them, and others determine how the resulting object will be seen and circulated.
FELT released the EP as its fourth catalog entry, following its earlier presentation of Järnnätter. The relationship between artist and label seems particularly well matched because neither tries to inflate this music through excessive explanation. The record is given enough framing to be found, but not enough to exhaust its mysteries. Distribution carries the four places outward while the places themselves retain their privacy.
Fyra platser lasts less than half an hour, yet it produces the sense of having travelled across a much larger duration. This comes partly from tempo, but more importantly from the way each sound is allowed to hold multiple times at once. A synthesizer can suggest a recording made yesterday, a machine remembered from the 1990s and a landscape whose geological movement began thousands of years ago. The tracks do not choose among those periods. They let them overlap.
Civilistjävel! demonstrates that music about place does not require documentary realism. Field recordings, interviews and local instruments could have supplied obvious evidence, but they might also have narrowed the imagination. Instead, Fyra platser preserves the gap between a geographic location and what that location means privately. The names are exact, while the music surrounding them remains open. Precision and mystery coexist without weakening one another.
The record is also a reminder that quiet music need not be passive. These pieces alter the room slowly but persistently. Their bass enters furniture and floorboards, their pulses reorganize attention, and their empty spaces make surrounding noises newly audible. A passing vehicle, footsteps from another apartment or the electrical hum of playback equipment can temporarily join the composition. The four places enter a fifth place, wherever the record is being heard.
Perhaps this is the final meaning of the title. Four places are named, but listening always creates another. Sebäng, Louhivesi, Kolugn and Valmsta are carried into bedrooms, record shops, headphones, postal packages, hard drives and rooms thousands of miles from the High Coast. The private coordinates remain intact while accumulating new listeners and associations. Memory does not stay pure when it travels, but travel may be how it remains alive.
Anyone who knows these locations, recognizes the family or regional history behind them, understands the words and memories moving through “Louhivesi,” or has compared the original and later vinyl pressings is warmly invited to add another point to the map. Fyra platser gives us four names and enough sound to feel their gravity, while wisely leaving the roads between them unfinished.

 

Träden - 2018 - Traden

 

Subliminal Sounds – SUB-128

Shortening Träd, Gräs och Stenar to Träden might look like a minor act of pruning. Trees, Grass and Stones becomes simply The Trees. Yet the removal changes the balance of the entire name. Grass spreads quickly and stones preserve the pressure of geological time, while trees remain visibly alive across generations, carrying old damage inside new growth. For this 2018 album, the name change allowed one of Sweden’s most enduring psychedelic organisms to acknowledge its history without pretending that history had remained motionless. The roots are unmistakable, but the musicians standing above them are creating another canopy.
The lineage behind this music is almost absurdly rich: Pärson Sound became International Harvester, then Harvester, then Träd, Gräs och Stenar, with reunions, losses and new participants continually altering the organism. Those changes were never merely cosmetic. Each name recorded a shift in personnel, intention and relation to the surrounding culture. Träden therefore does not feel like a new group purchasing the rights to an old mythology, nor like elderly survivors attempting to reproduce a vanished moment. It is another stage in a process that began when rock, minimalism, collective improvisation, environmental consciousness and Swedish folk memory were first allowed to grow together without anyone deciding which element should dominate.
Jakob Sjöholm provides the most direct living connection to the early Träd, Gräs och Stenar years, having joined the group in 1970. Beside him are Reine Fiske of Dungen and The Amazing, bassist Sigge Krantz of Archimedes Badkar, and Hanna Östergren of Hills, with former Träd, Gräs och Stenar drummer Nisse Törnqvist appearing on three pieces. Describing this as one original member accompanied by younger musicians would miss the actual chemistry. Fiske, Krantz and Östergren are not conservators carrying out instructions inside a protected historical building. They enter the music with their own histories, instincts and generations of listening, helping the group become a band again rather than a memorial organization.
The preceding album, Tack för kaffet, had served partly as a farewell to Torbjörn Abelli and Thomas Mera Gartz, foundational members who died in 2010 and 2012. Its title, approximately “Thanks for the coffee,” carried a beautifully ordinary Swedish manner of leaving after a long visit. Träden follows that farewell without trying to reverse it. The dead are not replaced, and the earlier band is not reconstructed. Instead, the surviving musical method is placed in the hands of a new combination of people. Mourning becomes continuity, not because loss is overcome, but because the living continue meeting in a room and discovering what remains possible.
The group recorded live to tape at its countryside workshop, Studio Svartsjölandet, between 2016 and 2018. That setting is essential to the album’s emotional scale. The performances feel sheltered from the machinery that usually forces music toward quick conclusions. A groove can continue until the musicians understand what kind of place it has created. A guitar can search without needing to convert every discovery into a formal solo. Silence, uncertainty and apparent wrong turns remain available. The countryside workshop is not audible through chirping birds or decorative field recordings alone. It is present as permission, the sense that nobody outside the room is hurrying the music toward usefulness.
“When the Lingonberries Ripen” begins by reaching farther backward than the Träd, Gräs och Stenar name itself. Thomas Tidholm’s song originally opened Harvester’s Hemåt, where its brief form resembled a faded summer photograph: colors, passing movement and the peculiar melancholy that enters when an ordinary day is remembered after its world has disappeared. Träden expands it to nearly twelve minutes. The old song is not simply covered. It is reopened, as though the photograph has become a doorway and the present musicians have stepped inside to examine everything beyond its original frame.
A low, revolving foundation establishes the track’s pace while the voices retain something of the earlier song’s communal plainness. Fiske and Sjöholm let their guitars drift around the vocal line rather than enclosing it. One guitar may burn slowly at the edge while another holds a rough repeated figure closer to the center. The improvisation does not erase the song. It enlarges the amount of weather surrounding it. What lasted a few minutes in 1969 now carries the distance separating two bands, several names and nearly half a century.
This opening establishes the album’s understanding of repetition. The musicians do not repeat because they have exhausted their supply of ideas. They repeat because an idea becomes useful only after ordinary attention has stopped demanding novelty from it. The groove must continue long enough to lose its status as a riff and become shared ground. Once that happens, every small adjustment gains meaning. A bass note leaning differently against the drums, a guitar entering at a rougher angle or a voice becoming more distant can alter the whole landscape without requiring a new section.
“Kung Karlsson” is lighter on its feet, driven by Krantz’s understated bass and a rhythm that shuffles rather than marches. Small keyboard gestures flutter through the arrangement while the guitars begin pulling loose strands from its cheerful surface. Träden’s music is often described as primitive, but primitive should not be mistaken for emotionally simple. A modest groove can contain humor, tenderness, nervousness and gathering intensity at the same time. The band does not separate those conditions into individually labeled passages. They let them coexist, which is closer to how an actual afternoon changes around a group of people.
The track also demonstrates how little interest the musicians have in establishing a hierarchy. Bass and drums are not merely supporting two guitarists waiting to ascend. Krantz and the drummers determine the physical world within which every other choice becomes possible. When the guitars start wandering farther outward, the rhythm section does not follow anxiously or attempt to dramatize the departure. It keeps the path visible. The resulting freedom is collective because nobody needs to seize control in order to prove that freedom exists.
“Tamburan” occupies another eleven minutes and introduces one of the album’s broadest open spaces. Its title suggests the sustaining resonance of a tambura, though the composition does not need to imitate that instrument literally. The idea of drone is enough. Repetition becomes a horizon, with guitars stretching across it in long streaks of fuzz and light. Nisse Törnqvist’s fluid drumming helps the piece breathe without fixing it inside a rigid pattern. The music can pause, surge and become almost motionless while retaining an internal current.
There is a special pleasure in hearing highly experienced musicians decline to advertise their experience. Nobody fills the track with technical proof. Fiske possesses a vast vocabulary of psychedelic guitar tone, but he uses that knowledge to make the ensemble stranger rather than to make himself larger. Sjöholm’s guitar has the weathered directness of someone who no longer needs to decorate every statement. The two players sometimes appear to exchange incomplete sentences, each leaving enough unspoken for the other to misunderstand productively.
That productive misunderstanding may be the real engine of improvisation. Perfect communication would produce exactly what everyone expects. Träden’s music depends upon small uncertainties: Was that phrase an invitation to intensify, withdraw or remain still? Should the rhythm follow the guitar’s turn, or should the guitar discover that it has left the rhythm behind? The musicians answer through action, and the composition grows from their accumulated answers. This is why the album’s long pieces feel inhabited rather than designed. Their structures emerge from social attention.
“Å nej” arrives with water, percussion and acoustic guitar, changing the record’s physical texture without abandoning its communal character. Its repeated “oh no” could announce disaster, but the performance sounds amused by the phrase’s inadequacy. The chorus is simple enough for anyone nearby to join, while electric guitar buzzes around the acoustic foundation like an insect with its own private complaint. After the expansive first three tracks, the song feels almost domestic, a crooked little gathering held beneath the same trees.
Humor is an essential part of this band’s freedom. Psychedelic music can become imprisoned by the solemnity of its own transcendence, as though opening consciousness requires everyone to speak in sacred tones and avoid ordinary foolishness. Träden understands that a strange communal chorus can change perception as effectively as a monumental guitar climax. Laughter, clumsiness and simple pleasure are not interruptions of the spiritual experience. They may be some of its least contaminated forms.
“Å nej” also prevents the album from becoming a uniform procession of noble jams. Its acoustic strumming, loose vocals and watery beginning restore the scale of people making music with available materials. The old Träd, Gräs och Stenar ideal was never merely to construct intimidating avant-garde monuments. It involved reducing the distance between performers and participants, treating music as something people could enter rather than expertise displayed above them. This song leaves the gate visibly open.
“OTO” moves into one of the album’s darkest regions. Distorted guitar establishes a slow, uneasy pressure while the drums proceed with enough restraint to make every strike feel structural. Another guitar begins illuminating the interior from different angles, sometimes shimmering and sometimes approaching a howl. The piece develops so gradually that its movement is easier to recognize afterward than while it is occurring. One looks back and discovers that the quiet opening has become an enormous room.
The title resists explanation, which is appropriate for an instrumental built from emotional information that never settles into language. “OTO” does not tell a story about darkness. It allows darkness to become a working musical environment. The band remains calm within it, refusing the familiar psychedelic requirement that every ominous passage must erupt into cathartic chaos. Intensity is generated through containment. The musicians keep carrying the pressure without granting it the relief of collapse.
This is where the album’s live-to-tape character becomes especially valuable. Digital editing can create enormous precision, but it can also remove the evidence that musicians had to live through the same duration the listener hears. “OTO” retains that duration. Every minute had to be inhabited in sequence, with no participant knowing exactly what the next one would contain. The recording preserves time as a shared physical commitment rather than a surface assembled afterward.
“Hoppas du förstår,” or “Hope You Understand,” returns the human voice with a gentleness that feels nearly exposed after “OTO.” Acoustic guitar provides a modest structure while Fiske’s esraj introduces a bowed, vocal-like ache around it. The instrument does not transform the track into a demonstration of borrowed exoticism. Its sustained tone occupies the uncertain region between accompaniment, human cry and surrounding air. It seems to say what the lyrics cannot safely carry alone.
The title can be heard as one of the simplest and most vulnerable statements a person can make. Hope you understand: not a demand for agreement, not a perfected explanation, only the wish that something private has crossed the distance between two minds without being destroyed. Träden’s entire musical method could be contained inside that phrase. The band offers a form, leaves space around it and trusts other people to enter according to their own understanding.
Compared with the surrounding improvisations, the track feels more tightly composed, but its emotional power still comes from openness. The voices are not polished into a single authoritative statement. Their slight roughness keeps the song social, the sound of people finding agreement without erasing individual grain. Sadness enters without theatrical enlargement. It is held among the instruments until it becomes bearable enough to share.
“Hymn” follows with no need for devotional language. The title names the music’s function rather than its subject. Sjöholm and Fiske weave arpeggios, broken melodic fragments and roughened chords around a slow foundation, creating reverence without specifying what must be revered. Buried environmental sounds and processing occasionally disturb the surface, preventing beauty from becoming sealed or decorative. The hymn remains connected to matter.
That material spirituality has followed the group through all its names. Their music repeatedly locates transcendence inside bodies, handmade equipment, food, weather, collective labor and the persistence of a repeated rhythm. It does not require leaving the world. It requires entering the world with enough attention that ordinary divisions begin weakening. Rock and folk, amateur and expert, audience and performer, composition and improvisation cease behaving as fortified categories.
The album closes with “Det finns blått,” or “There Is Blue,” a title that sounds at once obvious and mysterious. Blue exists in sky, water, distance, paint, electricity and the private emotional associations each listener carries toward the word. The composition does not identify which blue it means. It begins from the certainty that blue is present and allows the music to search for its location.
Over ten minutes, the guitars grow more storm-torn, the rhythm gathers force and the album’s earlier safety becomes less assured. Träden has offered warmth, humor, contemplation and communal patience, but the forest is not reduced to a comforting retreat. Weather changes inside it. Darkness is part of the ecology. The final piece allows distortion to acquire a larger physical scale while the band continues operating as a group rather than breaking into a contest of climactic gestures.
The ending matters because it denies the album an easy pastoral resolution. Träden’s countryside music is not an advertisement for escape into untouched nature. The forest contains decomposition, danger, old scars and organisms competing for light. Its beauty comes partly from that complexity. “Det finns blått” leaves the listener inside a landscape still moving after the record ends, with no final chord capable of placing everything safely in the past.
Across its seventy minutes, the album continually negotiates between inheritance and autonomy. The older band’s methods are present everywhere: extended repetition, collective playing, rough song forms, egalitarian musical space and the belief that a performance should remain open to transformation. Yet the exact sounds belong to this lineup. Fiske’s guitar language, Krantz’s bass weight, Östergren’s drumming and voice, Törnqvist’s contributions and the clearer countryside recording prevent the album from becoming an archaeological reenactment.
The participation of Hanna Östergren is particularly important to the sense that this is genuinely another band. As the only principal member who had not appeared on Tack för kaffet, she enters without being burdened by the exact same farewell. Her drumming can be firm, spacious or nearly tentative, responding to the guitars without becoming subordinate to them. She helps move the project from elegy toward renewed activity. The old rhythm cannot simply continue after the people who created it are gone; another body must discover its own relationship to the pulse.
Sigge Krantz performs a similarly quiet transformation. His bass rarely calls attention to itself through complexity, but it gives the long forms their confidence. Improvised rock can become weightless when every musician searches simultaneously. Krantz supplies gravity, allowing the others to wander without making the music sound indecisive. His lines often feel less like accompaniment than terrain, the ground accepting every footprint without dictating where the walkers must go.
Reine Fiske brings one of the most recognizable guitar sensibilities in modern Swedish psychedelia, yet the achievement is how naturally it is absorbed. His tones may shimmer, cry, grind or hover, but they remain in conversation with Sjöholm’s more weathered attack. The two guitars do not divide neatly into old and new, rhythm and lead, history and future. They cross those roles continuously, producing an intergenerational sound whose origin cannot always be assigned to one player.
Sjöholm’s presence prevents the album’s freedom from floating free of lived history. He is not presented as a ceremonial founder sitting above the younger musicians. His guitar and voice remain vulnerable to the same collective process as everyone else’s. The most convincing form of legacy may be this willingness to become one participant again, to let music associated with one’s own past be altered by people who entered it later.
The name change was therefore not an attempt to become modern by discarding inconvenient history. It was a way of preventing history from becoming a command. Calling the band Träden acknowledges continuity while leaving open what kind of trees these are, how many remain, what has grown between them and which branches no longer exist. A shorter name creates a larger imaginative space.
This also explains why the album can sound ancient and contemporary without making an argument about either condition. Its tape recording, long jams and folk-inflected vocals resist the compressed speed of modern listening, but the musicians do not behave as caretakers preserving an authentic 1970. Their world includes Dungen, Hills, The Amazing, Archimedes Badkar and decades of underground music influenced by the original group. The roots have grown back into the branches through listeners who became participants.
Subliminal Sounds is an especially fitting home for the record. The label helped return Pärson Sound and other endangered Swedish psychedelic recordings to circulation while also supporting newer artists who absorbed that history. Träden sits at the meeting point of those activities: neither a reissue nor a clean break, but living evidence that archival work can affect the future. A recovered recording enters new ears, those ears eventually produce musicians, and the musicians find themselves playing with someone heard on the recovered recording. The archive becomes a circuit rather than a cemetery.
The CD edition compresses this sprawling double-LP journey into one uninterrupted seventy-minute passage. On vinyl, the act of turning four sides introduces pauses and gives each sequence its own physical territory. On CD or through this rip, the album behaves more like one extended afternoon, with moods shifting while the listener remains inside the same broad duration. Neither form is neutral. Each produces a different forest from the same recordings.
What remains constant is the album’s refusal to force attention. Träden does not seize the room through volume, novelty or speed. The music establishes a modest pattern and continues working until the room has slowly reorganized itself around that pattern. A listener may initially hear casual jamming, then discover that breathing, walking and thought have adjusted to its pace. The record changes consciousness without loudly announcing that consciousness is being changed.
That may be the deepest continuity with the band’s earlier ideals. Freedom is not represented here by chaos or individual display. It is heard as room: room for a phrase to continue, room for another musician to misunderstand it, room for grief and humor to occupy the same gathering, room for old songs to become new experiences and room for listeners to enter without being told exactly what their participation should mean.
Träden is a record about survival that avoids the triumphal language usually attached to survival. The band did not endure unchanged. People died, names shifted, decades passed and cultural conditions became unrecognizable. Survival happened through alteration. The tree remained alive because it did not insist that every leaf resemble the first ones.
Anyone who saw this lineup during its 2018 tours, knows more about the Svartsjölandet workshop, recognizes the less obvious voices and instruments, or has compared the CD with the various double-vinyl pressings is invited to add another ring to the trunk. Music this collective should never have its history sealed by a single account.

Enforced - 2021 - Kill Grid

 

Century Media – 19439829542

Kill Grid begins with the sound of a system powering up. “The Doctrine” emerges through distant noise and a slow, threatening guitar figure before the full band drives through the opening like machinery breaking free of its restraints. Enforced understands one of thrash metal’s oldest dramatic tricks: speed becomes more violent when the listener has first been made to wait for it. The introduction does not merely delay the attack. It establishes an atmosphere of organized force, as though the music is not erupting spontaneously but executing instructions that were written long before anyone entered the room.
The title Kill Grid presents violence as a system rather than an isolated emotional event. A grid divides space into manageable sections, making land, buildings and human bodies easier to locate, measure and destroy. Killing becomes administrative. Coordinates replace names, targets replace people and decisions made at a safe distance become physical reality somewhere else. Enforced builds the album around that conversion of human life into expendable material. War is the most obvious form, but the grid extends into politics, ideology, social distrust and the countless mechanisms through which responsibility is distributed so widely that nobody admits to holding it.
This is Enforced’s second album, but in several ways it feels like the first complete statement by the lineup heard here. At the Walls gathered the group’s early demos with additional material, preserving the energy of a band discovering what it could do. Kill Grid was written as an album by musicians who had spent years playing together, touring relentlessly and learning exactly how much weight each member could add without slowing the others. Vocalist Knox Colby, guitarists Will Wagstaff and Zach Monahan, bassist Ethan Gensurowsky and drummer Alex Bishop sound less like five players combining influences than one mechanism with five independently moving parts.
Enforced formed from Richmond’s hardcore and punk underground, but Kill Grid makes clear that the band is not simply hardcore wearing a denim vest. The songs possess the structural ambition, guitar detail and metallic density of thrash, death metal and speed metal, while retaining hardcore’s direct relationship between sound and physical movement. A riff is judged not only by how cleverly it develops but by what it might cause a roomful of bodies to do. Thrash provides the blades, hardcore supplies the shoulders, and death metal adds enough weight to make every collision feel structurally significant.
Richmond is especially fertile ground for that mixture. The city’s musical history includes bands as different as GWAR, Avail, Municipal Waste, Iron Reagan, Lamb of God, Strike Anywhere, Division of Mind and countless smaller punk, hardcore and metal groups sharing venues, members, equipment and audiences. Enforced does not sound identical to any of them, but the city’s lack of interest in maintaining clean genre borders is audible throughout Kill Grid. Punk speed can coexist with elaborate solos, a hardcore breakdown can lead into death-metal double bass, and an old thrash rhythm can be used without turning the song into historical reenactment.
“The Doctrine” announces this mixed inheritance with unusual clarity. Alex Bishop’s drumming moves from the deliberate opening into a full-speed barrage while the guitars alternate between palm-muted propulsion, tremolo-picked menace and quick lead eruptions. Knox Colby does not sing above the arrangement so much as become another piece of percussion within it. His words strike in short, hard shapes, less concerned with melodic elevation than with forcing language through the same narrow space occupied by the riffs. The song’s doctrine is not explained calmly because doctrine rarely enters life as calm explanation. It becomes command, repetition and eventually instinct.
“UXO” turns the album’s military language toward a specific historical wound. The initials stand for unexploded ordnance, bombs and munitions that remain active after the war responsible for placing them has officially ended. Colby wrote the song about the continuing consequences of the United States’ bombing of Laos during the Vietnam War, where unexploded cluster munitions have remained buried across fields and forests for generations. This is the grid continuing to kill after the people who designed it have moved on, retired, died or rewritten the event as distant policy.
The music captures that delayed danger with a groove that feels both immediate and trapped. Will Wagstaff drew upon the driving double-bass movement of Obituary and Carcass while writing the song, and that influence can be heard in the way the riff keeps pressing forward without becoming conventional speed-metal flight. The rhythm has enormous traction. It feels capable of dragging machinery through mud. Above it, the guitars introduce unexpectedly melodic leads, creating a flash of beauty within music about objects whose bright colors and small size have sometimes made them especially dangerous to children.
That contrast is one of Kill Grid’s strongest techniques. Enforced does not reserve melody for relief from ugliness. Melody becomes part of the ugliness, a sharp light exposing what has been hidden. The solos throughout the album often reach upward with the dramatic vocabulary of classic heavy metal, but the rhythm section below them refuses to become heroic scenery. Bishop and Gensurowsky keep the ground unstable. Any moment of elevation remains attached to consequences.
“Beneath Me” is among the album’s most immediately physical tracks. Its opening riff carries the clenched momentum of late-eighties thrash, but Colby’s delivery prevents the song from becoming a loving genre exercise. His voice has little of the theatrical separation between singer and audience associated with traditional metal frontmen. It resembles someone shouting from inside the same collision everyone else is experiencing. The repeated declaration of superiority becomes increasingly unstable, less an expression of confidence than a personality attempting to crush everything below it before its own weakness becomes visible.
Enforced’s politics work most effectively at this intersection between institutional violence and individual psychology. Systems do not operate without people willing to internalize their logic. Doctrine becomes identity; hierarchy becomes personal worth; fear becomes aggression against whoever has been placed beneath the speaker. “Beneath Me” does not offer a sociology lecture because the riff already explains the process physically. Power is experienced as downward pressure.
“Malignance” begins with one of the record’s most vicious forward surges, a compact demonstration of how much detail Enforced can force through a song without weakening its first impact. The word malignance describes something harmful that grows, spreads and invades surrounding tissue. It belongs equally to disease, hatred and corrupt authority. The music behaves accordingly. The central riff reproduces itself with slight mutations, each repetition carrying the infection farther while Bishop’s drums prevent the listener from finding a safe distance from which to observe it.
The dual guitars are crucial here. Wagstaff and Monahan do not divide into a simple arrangement of rhythm player and heroic lead player. Their parts grind against one another, sometimes reinforcing the same motion and sometimes creating a second line that makes the first feel more dangerous. When the solos arrive, they are fast without becoming weightless. Whammy-bar dives and sharply articulated runs sound less like ornamental virtuosity than pieces of hot metal thrown from the main machine.
The title track occupies the center of the album and deliberately interrupts its pattern of compact attacks. At more than seven minutes, “Kill Grid” creates room for Enforced to show what exists beyond speed. The opening is slower, more oppressive and nearly ceremonial. A broad guitar figure advances over drums that feel less like a sprint than a procession toward an already determined outcome. Colby’s voice enters with additional space around it, allowing each phrase to land as a separate command.
The change in scale deepens the title’s meaning. The kill grid is not merely the moment of attack. It is the entire environment that makes attack possible: mapping, surveillance, planning, language, obedience and distance. Enforced stretches the song so that violence becomes atmospheric. Rather than passing through a quick depiction of destruction, the listener remains inside the system long enough to hear its logic becoming normal.
When the track accelerates, the movement feels less like liberation than activation. The grid has finished calculating. Guitars begin cutting across the rhythm while the drums increase pressure, but the slower opening continues haunting the faster sections. Enforced makes speed sound predetermined rather than spontaneous, the result of a process whose earlier stages were quieter but no less violent.
The long decaying ending is particularly important. After the riffs have completed their work, noise remains like smoke above an emptied area. Most thrash songs end at the instant of impact, preserving violence as excitement without requiring anyone to inspect the aftermath. “Kill Grid” refuses that clean exit. The song leaves machinery humming after human activity has disappeared. Destruction continues as atmosphere.
“Curtain Fire” begins the album’s second half with one of its most memorable combinations of hardcore impact and metal architecture. The term refers to concentrated gunfire creating a barrier through which movement becomes nearly impossible. Enforced translates that idea into rhythm. The opening does not simply ask for headbanging; it establishes a physical boundary, a repeated force against which the listener’s body can push.
The song reportedly began as a faster, more straightforward metal piece before the band discarded much of that version and rebuilt it around the final introduction. That decision reveals the difference between raw velocity and controlled impact. Enforced already knew how to play fast. The greater discovery was where not to accelerate, where a slower pattern could create anticipation and make the eventual release feel larger. “Curtain Fire” moves as though the band is opening and closing routes through the song, briefly permitting escape before another barrage seals the space.
Its lyrics present war as continuous sensory overload: camouflage, craters, bombardment and a landscape altered until it no longer resembles ordinary earth. The music preserves some exhilaration because this remains crossover thrash designed for movement, but the images deny any uncomplicated fantasy of battlefield glory. Enforced’s riffs can feel heroic while the words reveal the machinery consuming whoever has been sent to perform the heroism.
“Hemorrhage” moves that violence into the social body. Colby described the song partly through the death of innocence amid a culture of distrust, outrage and skepticism, with an innocent person becoming collateral damage in conflicts they may not understand or control. The title imagines society bleeding internally, losing life through wounds that cannot be contained because everyone is too occupied assigning blame to apply pressure.
The opening is one of the album’s most efficient traps. A guitar figure creates a fraction of uncertainty before the full rhythm section arrives, and the song begins moving with the merciless clarity of a vehicle whose steering has locked. Colby’s voice sounds especially raw here, each line expelled rather than delivered. The chorus does not relieve the pressure through melody. It gives the pressure a phrase that a crowd can return.
This is where Enforced’s hardcore background becomes more than a stylistic ingredient. Hardcore understands that a lyric can become collectively meaningful without becoming complex. A short line shouted by one person may describe private fury; repeated by an entire room, it becomes evidence that the condition is shared. Kill Grid was released while live music remained severely restricted by the pandemic, which made this communal design feel almost cruelly suspended. These songs were built to travel through bodies just as the bodies had been separated.
“Blood Ribbon” has one of the album’s most evocative titles. A ribbon ordinarily marks celebration, remembrance or membership, but blood converts it into the visible path left by injury. It can connect victim and weapon, present action and future consequence, the living and the dead. The song’s riffs behave like tightening strands. They twist around the beat while the drums continue driving forward, producing a sense of being pulled into the composition rather than merely struck by it.
Gensurowsky’s bass is especially important throughout these middle and later tracks. The guitars occupy so much abrasive frequency that the record could easily have become thin beneath them. His bass gives the riffs mass, making their movement feel three-dimensional. It does not always call attention to itself as a separate melodic instrument, but remove it and much of the album’s physical authority would disappear. The grid requires infrastructure.
“Trespasser” closes the album with another expansion of form. Like the title track, it spends more time in mid-tempo territory, allowing the riffs to acquire a broader Bay Area thrash character before the band returns to full acceleration. The title introduces someone entering restricted ground, but the record has continually questioned who created the restriction and whose presence is treated as legitimate. Land becomes battlefield, civilian space becomes target area and survival itself can be classified as unlawful movement.
The song’s slower passages give Colby’s vocal rhythm additional room, exposing how closely his phrasing is connected to the guitars. He does not place complete sentences neatly over measures. Words strike between guitar accents, double a drum hit or extend across a riff before being cut off by the next change. His voice is part of the arrangement’s engineering. The lyrics may be the carrier of the album’s political and psychological meaning, but their placement is musical before it is explanatory.
When “Trespasser” accelerates, the album appears to make one final attempt at escaping its own boundaries. Solos break loose, Bishop’s drums increase speed and the compact formation briefly becomes chaotic. Yet Enforced never loses the grid completely. The musicians know exactly where the next turn will land. This precision is what makes the record feel dangerous rather than merely frantic. Chaos is most convincing when someone has constructed it carefully.
Arthur Rizk’s mix and master preserve that balance between control and abrasion. His work with Power Trip, Eternal Champion, Cavalera Conspiracy and other heavy bands has repeatedly demonstrated an understanding that retro-minded metal does not need to sound like a weak imitation of an old recording. Kill Grid has the grain and guitar-forward aggression associated with classic thrash, but the low end carries modern physical weight. The record is clear enough for its internal movements to register and dirty enough that clarity never becomes sterility.
Knox Colby described the intended production as a point between music recorded in a tin can and music surrounded by chrome. That is an unusually accurate description of the result. The album is neither deliberately primitive nor polished into reflective perfection. Bob Quirk and Ricky Olson’s recording gives the instruments a recognizable room and body, while Rizk concentrates them into a surface capable of surviving high volume without losing its edges.
The drums deserve particular attention because crossover records can become trapped between punk thinness and metal artificiality. Bishop sounds fast but not weightless, precise but not mechanically corrected into anonymity. The double-bass passages add density without reducing every song to a continuous trigger barrage. His snare provides much of the album’s forward violence, while cymbals spread enough wreckage across the upper frequencies to make the cleaner guitar details feel temporarily endangered.
Wagstaff has explained that the addition of Bishop and Gensurowsky made Enforced thicker, stronger and capable of longer compositions. Kill Grid is the audible proof. The rhythm section does not merely improve the execution of songs that could have appeared on the earlier record. It expands what the band is able to imagine. A seven-minute title track becomes possible because the musicians can maintain pressure across different tempos without allowing the song to sag.
Joe Petagno’s cover completes the record with an image that refuses color almost entirely. Petagno received the lyrics and a short description of the album, then produced a black-and-gray landscape of bodies, machinery and intertwined destruction. His long association with Motörhead gives him a nearly foundational place in heavy-metal visual language, but the Kill Grid cover does not rely upon the familiar comfort of the War-Pig. It resembles a civilization converted into one enormous weapons diagram.
The lack of bright color is appropriate because Kill Grid contains no clean division between combatant and landscape, machinery and flesh, authority and wreckage. Everything has entered the same gray ecosystem. The image rewards the same kind of attention as the music. Initial impact gives way to smaller details, each revealing another component trapped inside the structure. The cover does not illustrate one song. It displays the environment that could produce all nine.
Enforced’s influences are easy enough to identify: Slayer’s guitar violence, Sepultura’s percussive force, Demolition Hammer’s density, Obituary’s diseased groove, Cro-Mags and Leeway’s physical relationship with hardcore audiences, and the newer example of Power Trip proving that thrash could be historically informed without becoming domesticated by nostalgia. Kill Grid matters because those references have stopped functioning as separate destinations. They have become the raw material of a band whose local scene and lived chemistry determine the final shape.
The album’s connection with Power Trip is especially difficult to ignore because Arthur Rizk worked on both bands and Knox Colby’s bark can occupy some of the same emotional territory as Riley Gale’s. Yet Enforced does not reproduce Power Trip’s particular mixture. Kill Grid is more death-metal corroded, more fascinated by battlefield language and less interested in turning every riff into immediate rock-and-roll release. Its aggression feels heavier with aftermath.
The record was largely completed before COVID-19 transformed daily life, but its March 2021 release placed it inside a world already reorganized by isolation, distrust, political conflict and mass death. Songs about invisible danger, expendability, systems failing ordinary people and violence continuing beyond official declarations acquired an accidental second context. Enforced did not need to write a pandemic album. The existing grid simply became easier to see.
There is a danger in praising music like this only for aggression, as though its purpose were to provide forty-one minutes of safe simulated violence before returning the listener unchanged to ordinary life. Kill Grid certainly delivers physical exhilaration. Its riffs accelerate thought, its drums energize the body and its breakdowns possess the wonderful democratic bluntness of a large object arriving exactly when expected. But the album does not leave that energy politically empty.
The lyrics continually ask who absorbs the consequences after powerful institutions convert decisions into abstractions. Laotian civilians inherit unexploded bombs. Soldiers inherit the orders and landscapes created by distant planners. Innocent people become crossfire. Communities hemorrhage while competing doctrines explain why responsibility belongs elsewhere. The songs do not pretend these conditions can be solved through a circle pit, but they prevent the language surrounding them from remaining bloodless.
That may be why the album’s musical precision matters so much. Enforced answers systems of organized violence with another form of organization, but one directed toward recognition rather than concealment. Five musicians coordinate their labor, convert private anger into shared rhythm and produce an object capable of travelling beyond its original room. The grid is reclaimed temporarily. Instead of reducing people to targets, it connects bodies through sound.
The band’s DIY history remains audible even after signing with Century Media. Colby described Enforced’s work ethic in terms of booking its own shows, arranging tours and continuing to spearhead tasks rather than assuming a larger label would replace that responsibility. Kill Grid may have stronger international distribution than the earlier records, but it does not sound separated from the rooms that formed the band. The songs remain built from the expectation that musicians must earn a physical response in real time.
This gives the record a welcome absence of prestige. Enforced is technically skilled, historically informed and conceptually serious, but Kill Grid never pauses to admire those qualities. Every sophisticated decision is returned immediately to use. A carefully arranged transition exists to make the next impact harder. A detailed solo exists to sharpen the emotional pressure. Research into warfare becomes a lyric that can be screamed by people who may later search for the history behind it.
Kill Grid is therefore both an exceptionally forceful metal record and an argument about how force is administered. Its surface offers speed, weight, hooks and enough guitar violence to animate nearly any exhausted body. Beneath that surface is a darker map connecting doctrine, war, social division, contaminated ground and the ways human suffering survives beyond the official ending of an event.
The final effect is not nihilism. A truly nihilistic record would not require this much discipline, research, friendship or collective effort. Enforced sounds furious because human life matters enough for its destruction to remain intolerable. Every riff is another refusal to let the grid become invisible. Anyone who saw this lineup before the album, knows more about the Richmond rooms where the songs developed, owns one of the different vinyl editions or has details about the recording sessions is invited to add another coordinate. The grid may have been designed from above, but its history can still be reconstructed from the people moving underneath it.