The Flenser Vinyl, CD & Tape 61 Items

Have a Nice Life released their debut double-album Deathconsciousness in 2008 to a whimper and critical non-interest; six years later, the band followed it up with 2014’s stunner The Unnatural World. In the meantime, Deathconsciousness has become a cult classic whose seamless blend of shoegaze, post-punk, new wave, industrial and noise influences inspires fanatic obsession. Now, longtime Have a Nice Life collaborator The Flenser reissues Deathconsciousness on colored vinyl with deluxe packaging. The band commented, “Working with Flenser lets us keep things comfortable on our end, while also pressing enough copies to actually meet the need and not creating an artificially inflated collector’s market, as happened with some of our past releases.”

Rhythmic, primal and expansive, Deathconsciousness offers a meditation on death, loss and unrequited love, with repeated listens revealing new layers of depth and meaning. The Flenser’s reissue is accompanied by a 75-page booklet detailing the dark and forgotten history of the Antiochean cult—an engrossing narrative that blurs the lines between liner notes, novella and academic text.

This colorway is limited to 150 copies and only available at HHV.

With the broader adoption of the internet around the turn of the century, how people would engage with and discover underground music would change forever. As a result of the new digital era, DIY was now worldwide, and no band embraced this new frontier better than Have A Nice Life. Formed in 2000 by duo Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, the Middletown, CT-based pair would, throughout the 00s, self-release and share a number of demos and home recordings via early social media channels as well as establish its in-house label Enemies List Home Recordings. These first steps set in motion Have A Nice Life’s rise to renown as an icon of underground music in the internet age, culminating with the release of its pivotal 2008 debut album, Deathconsciousness. Through word of mouth and online discussion, Deathconsciousness became subject to viral praise thanks to its synthesis of bleak post-punk, lo-fi shoegaze, and carpets of hypnotic drone music. Eventually, this humble self-released project would attain the status of a post-internet cult classic, amassing Have A Nice Life a fervent online following that the band would interact with in kind.

In an effort to thank and continue to engage with Have A Nice Life’s internet cult following, Barrett and Macuga would regularly share links to old demos, works in progress, and outtakes from the recording of Deathconsciousness. Over time, a group of fans would compile these demos into an unofficial release. Dubbed Voids, this fan-made compilation several alternate takes of tracks from Deathconsciousness, as well as a handful of early versions of songs that would appear on Have A Nice Life’s two following albums, The Unnatural World and Sea of Worry. While undeniably reminiscent of their final album version counterparts, the earlier versions of these tracks each feel distinct in a way that makes the moody, decidedly lo-fi aura of Voids an essential slice of the Have A Nice Life discography. Hungry for more from the enigmatic duo, fans swarmed around this compilation, accompanied by loud calls for it to receive a physical release. Seeing that demand and with the band’s blessing, a pair of fan-made tape pressings of Voids would be released via Music Ruins Lives, a DIY label run by Have A Nice Life superfan Thom Wasluck, also known for his band Planning for Burial. Between both instances of the tape swiftly selling out and the compilation’s long absence from streaming services, Voids has historically been an elusive release to track down, only available in the obscurest corners of the internet or physically on the secondary market at eye-wateringly high prices. Over a decade since its initial, unofficial release in 2011, The Flenser is proud to reissue Have A Nice Life’s Voids for the first time ever in an official capacity in physical form. Originally released digitally in early 2023 and freshly remastered for the occasion, this reissue of the beloved compilation will receive its first-ever wide release on physical formats (CD/LP/Cassette). This release also marks the first time fan-favorite tracks from Voids “Sisyphus”, “I’m Doctor House”, and “Human Error” will be available on vinyl and CD. Like a symbolic passing of the torch, the physical versions of the 2023 Voids reissue come with a foreword essay written by Wasluck, the previous custodian of Voids during the Music Ruins Lives days.

“‘Some time in the Spring of 2009, I tried to kill myself. Six months before that, I used a Voor’s Head Device for the first time.’ This line opens the 150-page book that accompanies Giles Corey, an intensely personal, intimate portrait of depression that took me almost four years to make.” —Dan Barrett


Giles Corey’s haunting self-titled debut is back in print! The Flenser is pleased to offer a new version of this cult favorite as a double LP housed in a gatefold jacket, with the same 150-page book that accompanied the previous versions.

Giles Corey is the gloomy folk-driven solo project from Have A Nice Life mastermind Dan Barrett. Here, Barrett forgoes the post-industrial trappings of Have A Nice Life in favor of an intimate singer-songwriter approach. While thematically related to his other work—dealing with subjects like suicide, death and the paranormal—Giles Corey feels more personal, with impressive shifts from quiet desperation to cathartic outburst. Over the years the album has gained a fervent following, and has sometimes been compared to a religious experience. It is dark yet purgative enterprise not for the frail of heart.

The accompanying book is an integral part of the album. Its examinations of the life and times of cult leader Robert Voor parallel the themes within the lyrics and offer further immersion for the reflective listener. In Barrett’s own words: “The album follows a story arc of emotions that are detailed in the accompanying book, as much a part of this record as the music. The text switches between personal tales of struggles with depression, suicide, and a feeling of being lost, and the story of cult-leader and afterlife theorist Robert Voor. Voor’s writings on death and the afterlife feature prominently across Have A Nice Life’s Deathconsciousness, Nahvalr’s self-titled debut, and Giles Corey, making him the unifying factor behind most of the music I’ve written in the last ten years. This record is as personal and raw as anything I’ve ever done.”

In 2008, Have A Nice Life released their now cult classic Deathconsciousness LP to a whimper and critical non-interest. Six years after its release the band followed up with 2014's stunner The Unnatural World, Deathconsciousness has become a force of influence and fanatic obsession. Seamlessly blending, with unparalleled depth and weight, shoegaze, post punk, new wave, industrial and noise. The album was originally released by Enemies List Home Recordings founded by HANL members Dan and Tim. The album has since floated in and out of production, with the last instantly out of print vinyl pressing occurring in 2009. Now, longtime HANL collaborator The Flenser will re-issue Deathconsciousness with deluxe packaging, including a lengthy accompanying zine. Have A Nice Life commented, “Working with Flenser lets us keep things comfortable on our end, while also pressing enough copies to actually meet the need and not creating an artificially-inflated collector’s market, as happened with some of our past releases.”


The Flenser's reissue of Deathconsciousness will be accompanied by a 75-page booklet detailing the dark and forgotten history of the Antiochean cult. Blurring the lines between novella, liner notes, and academic text, the zine itself presents an engrossing narrative. The album is rhythmic, primal and expansive and is a gloomy-post-punk masterpiece; a mediation on death, loss and unrequited love. Deathconsciousness feels more fresh and engaging with every listen and has held up as a remarkable piece of art. Fans of Have A Nice Life exhibit both cultic thought and action for good reason. It is perhaps a fanbase as dark and mysterious as the Antiochean’s, the album itself revolves around. Now The Flenser is honored to rerelease Deathconsciousness a gorgeous and disarming contribution to the modern lexicon for a larger audience.

Limited edition of 150 copies only available at HHV in opaque grey vinyl.

For years, fans of Connecticut’s post-industrial doomgaze two-piece Have a Nice Life have restlessly awaited the band’s second gloom-fueled, autobiographical meditation. Now, San Francisco label The Flenser is proud to unleash The Unnatural World. With eight songs clocking in at 47 minutes, The Unnatural World is Have a Nice Life’s most monumental release yet—a colossal, perfectly orchestrated work that leaves listeners comatose on the ground beside their record players. This second full-length delivers doom and gloom at a new level, more focused and soul-tearing than ever. The weight of sound is matched only by the band’s piercingly uncomfortable and personal lyrics, dredging up themes of modern legend, religious insecurity and crushing depression. Wave after overwhelming wave will slam listeners down into psychological depths of existentialism and woe. Like its predecessor, the band’s 2008 debut Deathconsciousness, The Unnatural World maintains intensity from quiet lows to staggering highs. No speaker will do it justice, and none of you are worthy!

Since its formation in 2018 by like-minded Calarts students Alex Kent (guitar, vocals), April Gerloff (bass), and Sylvie Simmons (guitar), as well as the recent addition of Clint Dodson (percussionist), Los Angeles-based quartet Sprain has honed its signature flavor of experimentalism to a razor-fine point. Gradually moving from twisting conventions in its early works of minimalist slowcore to now transcending the confines of genre altogether, Sprain’s evolution over the past several years has encouraged the band to embrace a sound true to its muse. With its latest record, The Lamb As Effigy or Three Hundred And Fifty Xoxoxos For A Spark Union With My Darling Divine, the band has translated this intent into an ambitious work that pairs its resplendent scale with uncompromising honesty towards the band’s artistic and conceptual essences.

The most extraordinary of art isn’t created without its fair share of trials, of which Sprain faced numerous during the recording process of The Lamb As Effigy, with the sum and circumstances of them nearly sealing the album’s fate in limbo. With obstacles including session reschedulings as a result of a line-up change and a major studio electrical failure at the last possible moment, a mixing process that demanded the organization of several years of material across four separate studios, and the recording of the actual songs pushing the members of Sprain to their own physical limits, there were several times where the band considered scrapping the whole thing altogether. But Sprain persevered, applying the knowledge and willpower derived from those struggles to get The Lamb As Effigy across the finish line.

Clocking in at nearly two hours, The Lamb As Effigy resembles an aural parallel to the human experience itself, with all the glorious beauty, crushing brutality, and unexplainable chaos that comes with it intact. Explosions of earth-sundering guitars, angelic keys, swirling strings, and bursts of improvised electronic noise coalesce to weave a visceral yet unique sonic tapestry bearing hints of no-wave, sound collage, 20th-century avant-garde, and free jazz. Spanning bellowing howls, emphatic spoken word, and nuanced croons, Alex Kent’s dynamic vocal delivery adds texture to these eight meditations on otherwise immaterial topics and the meaning or the lack thereof they embody.

In late 2014, Planning For Burial’s Thom Wasluck left the red house in New Jersey he’d called home for the last decade to return to his childhood bedroom in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Back in the house where he grew up, Wasluck found himself cut off from the familiarities of the previous decade as he put himself to work in the family trade. The monotony of routine quickly set in; work, home, and alcohol day after day became the norm. The childhood room that had given birth to his primordial four-track recordings was now a place of emptiness. These conditions set the stage for Planning For Burial’s third full-length, Below the House. In terms of genre, Planning For Burial is often simply characterized as “gloom,” which can be seen as a blend of slowcore, shoegaze, doom, 90s alt rock and drone, and this album offers nine sullen and frequently heavy songs that brim with nostalgia and suburban ennui. It is a return to form of sorts to his beloved first album, 2010’s Leaving — an introverted work characterized by its heavy dynamics and personal obsessions. Since the beginning, Planning For Burial has been a solo endeavor. Wasluck has been recording music himself and touring extensively as a one-man band, playing hundreds of shows in DIY spaces and nightclubs, where he has shared the stage with acts like Deafheaven, King Woman and Chelsea Wolfe. Both incredibly loud and intimate, Planning For Burial plays with an unrivaled passion and funereal grace that is equally at home in basements and large venues.

With the broader adoption of the internet around the turn of the century, how people would engage with and discover underground music would change forever. As a result of the new digital era, DIY was now worldwide, and no band embraced this new frontier better than Have A Nice Life. Formed in 2000 by duo Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, the Middletown, CT-based pair would, throughout the 00s, self-release and share a number of demos and home recordings via early social media channels as well as establish its in-house label Enemies List Home Recordings. These first steps set in motion Have A Nice Life’s rise to renown as an icon of underground music in the internet age, culminating with the release of its pivotal 2008 debut album, Deathconsciousness. Through word of mouth and online discussion, Deathconsciousness became subject to viral praise thanks to its synthesis of bleak post-punk, lo-fi shoegaze, and carpets of hypnotic drone music. Eventually, this humble self-released project would attain the status of a post-internet cult classic, amassing Have A Nice Life a fervent online following that the band would interact with in kind.

In an effort to thank and continue to engage with Have A Nice Life’s internet cult following, Barrett and Macuga would regularly share links to old demos, works in progress, and outtakes from the recording of Deathconsciousness. Over time, a group of fans would compile these demos into an unofficial release. Dubbed Voids, this fan-made compilation several alternate takes of tracks from Deathconsciousness, as well as a handful of early versions of songs that would appear on Have A Nice Life’s two following albums, The Unnatural World and Sea Of Worry. Fans swarmed around this compilation, accompanied by loud calls for it to receive a physical release. A tape pressing of Voids would be released via Music Ruins Lives, a DIY label run by Have A Nice Life superfan Thom Wasluck, also known for his band Planning for Burial. Between both instances of the tape swiftly selling out and the compilation’s long absence from streaming services, Voids has historically been an elusive release to track down, only available in the obscurest corners of the internet or physically on the secondary market at eye-wateringly high prices.

Over a decade since its initial, unofficial release in 2011, The Flenser is proud to reissue Have A Nice Life’s Voids for the first time ever in an official capacity in physical form.

The Flenser is pleased to announce the release of Living Is Easy, the latest EP from ecstatic black metal band Agriculture. This new EP will be paired with the band’s debut EP, The Circle Chant. For the first time, both EPs will be pressed together on a single 12-inch vinyl record as well as a cassette format

Living Is Easy represents a significant new statement from the band. With their debut self-titled, Agriculture embarked on a journey to explore how heavy music can provide insights into the joys of life, both everyday and divine. Their extensive touring with this material led to a profound experience of ecstasy, surpassing expectations as they shared the intensity and joy of these songs with audiences worldwide. This experience was a catalyst for the band, inspiring them to delve even deeper into the realm of “ecstatic black metal” music. They believes that with this release they have pushed this concept to its limit, resulting in a transformative explosion of sound and meaning.

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.

With the broader adoption of the internet around the turn of the century, how people would engage with and discover underground music would change forever. As a result of the new digital era, DIY was now worldwide, and no band embraced this new frontier better than Have A Nice Life. Formed in 2000 by duo Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, the Middletown, CT-based pair would, throughout the 00s, self-release and share a number of demos and home recordings via early social media channels as well as establish its in-house label Enemies List Home Recordings. These first steps set in motion Have A Nice Life’s rise to renown as an icon of underground music in the internet age, culminating with the release of its pivotal 2008 debut album, Deathconsciousness. Through word of mouth and online discussion, Deathconsciousness became subject to viral praise thanks to its synthesis of bleak post-punk, lo-fi shoegaze, and carpets of hypnotic drone music. Eventually, this humble self-released project would attain the status of a post-internet cult classic, amassing Have A Nice Life a fervent online following that the band would interact with in kind.

In an effort to thank and continue to engage with Have A Nice Life’s internet cult following, Barrett and Macuga would regularly share links to old demos, works in progress, and outtakes from the recording of Deathconsciousness. Over time, a group of fans would compile these demos into an unofficial release. Dubbed Voids, this fan-made compilation several alternate takes of tracks from Deathconsciousness, as well as a handful of early versions of songs that would appear on Have A Nice Life’s two following albums, The Unnatural World and Sea Of Worry. Fans swarmed around this compilation, accompanied by loud calls for it to receive a physical release. A tape pressing of Voids would be released via Music Ruins Lives, a DIY label run by Have A Nice Life superfan Thom Wasluck, also known for his band Planning for Burial. Between both instances of the tape swiftly selling out and the compilation’s long absence from streaming services, Voids has historically been an elusive release to track down, only available in the obscurest corners of the internet or physically on the secondary market at eye-wateringly high prices.

Over a decade since its initial, unofficial release in 2011, The Flenser is proud to reissue Have A Nice Life’s Voids for the first time ever in an official capacity in physical form.

In an artistic landscape fueled by gamified promotional tactics, spasmodic virality, and manufactured controversy, the amount of noise that independent artists must cut through can seem overwhelming. Yet, it’s the most genuine statements—often those expecting no audience at all—that overcome. The Origin Of My Depression, the 2019 album from Australian experimentalist Uboa, proves just that; presenting such a deeply affecting mix of dark ambient, noise, and extreme metal, it all but demanded its unplanned but unsurprising cult following. With several tracks that began as live improvisations recorded in the living-room-turned-bedroom, and others recorded from live sets in venues, The Origin Of My Depression exhibits the spontaneity and ineffability of extreme emotions. Xandra Metcalfe, the mind behind Uboa, offers sonic representations of her anxieties, depressive thoughts, and lived experiences throughout the record’s seven songs, even if the origins of these feelings escape her. The result, intensely and authentically personal, undeniably resonates, as The Origin Of My Depression spread through online communities through sheer word of mouth upon its initial release. Now, four years later, the record stands as a defining statement of late 2010s underground music, and it takes just one listen to see why. Uboa has spent the better part of a decade dipping into every corner of heavy music. From harsh noise to dark ambient, glitch to doom metal, Metcalfe’s output, though sonically varied, remains consistent in her use of such styles to express her mental state at the time of writing. Whether it's her live performances (described as a panic attack presented on stage) or her recorded material, her eclectic approach to dark music has led Uboa to become an unlikely but deserving cult figure in online music. “A breakthrough in the underground” - Anthony Fantano, The Needle Drop

Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they’re revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller. While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones— including arena country music. The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.” “Chat Pile bring a sense of dirt and squalor to the table.” —The Fader “Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile are the perfect people to expose the dark, seedy underbelly of American life.” —Paste Magazine “Cleansingly punishing.” —Stereogum “Harrowing.” —Pitchfork

Have A Nice Life released their debut double-album Deathconsciousness in 2008 to a whimper and critical non-interest; six years later, the band followed it up with 2014’s stunner The Unnatural World. In the meantime, Deathconsciousness has become a cult classic whose seamless blend of shoegaze, post-punk, new wave, industrial and noise influences inspires fanatic obsession. Rhythmic, primal and expansive, Deathconsciousness offers a meditation on death, loss and unrequited love, with repeated listens revealing new layers of depth and meaning.

Midwife is the moniker of multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston. She lives and works in San Miguel, New Mexico by way of Denver, Colorado, where she spent the better half of the past decade developing her experimental pop project. As a self taught guitarist and recording engineer, Midwife explores dark subject matter in her anthemic, soft-gaze hits. Self-described as “Heaven Metal,” or emotive music about devastation - catharsis.

When 2020 began, Johnston had several national and international tours planned, but the pandemic shifted her focus back to recording, and back to her internal landscape. Midwife’s third full length record, Luminol, was written and produced during quarantine.

Luminol is a chemical used by forensic investigators to reveal trace amounts of blood left at a crime scene. When it reacts with blood, luminol emits a chemiluminescent blue glow that can be seen in a darkened room. In the same way this chemical reveals evidence at a scene, Midwife is interested in profound truth - turning trial and tribulation into sources of light.

Luminol navigates themes of incarceration, locus of control, clarity, self harm, confinement, agency, and truth-seeking, all erupting in a bioluminescent Rothko color-field of blue.

The Luminol album cover shows a dark figure standing at the edge of a body of water. It symbolizes the way humanity had been on a precipice throughout 2020, to later find out they had been there all along. Being one of Midwife’s most personal records, Luminol's cover artwork is a picture of Madeline Johnston's mother taken in the 1980’s, when she was the same age as Madeline at the time of recording. By redacting the figure, Johnston hopes that anyone could see themselves there, by the water, as a form leftover when all the elements of their lives are stripped away and what is left is a host.

Luminol features collaborations from Tucker Theodore, Angel Diaz (Vyva Melinkolya), Zachary Cole Smith, Ben Newman, and Colin Caulfield (diiv), and Dan Barrett (Have A Nice Life).

Written at home and refined on the road, the 5 new tracks that comprise As Lost Through Collision are parts monolithic and minimalist, manic and mellow. Engineered by Josiah Mazzaschi at The Cave (Built to Spill, The Jesus and Mary Chain) and mixed by Tim Green at Louder Studios (The Melvins, Lungfish, Jawbreaker), the music here retains its organic purity and captures Sprain in its truest state. The listener can hear every instrument and every tonal deviation while the band members embrace musical and philosophical abstraction in their art practice; they emphasize sound as force, differentiating the concept of pure sound from music. And although As Lost Through Collision is a departure from their previous EP, it still retains Sprain’s former slowcore aesthetic. “This record was a conscious effort to move beyond the initial style we experimented with on our last EP into something more unique — something more ‘us,’” they comment.

As Midwife, Denver based multi-instrumentalist Madeline Johnston plays what she describes as “Heaven Metal,” or emotive music about devastation. Johnston began developing the experimental pop project in 2015 while a resident of beloved Denver DIY space Rhinoceropolis. The venue/co-op started in the early aughts and nurtured local artists until 2016, when its doors were shuttered due to high tensions surrounding the safety of DIY spaces (not coincidentally following the horrific Ghost Ship fire in Oakland). Residents were displaced around Denver and artists like Midwife were forced to start over.

However, it was at Rhinoceropolis that Madeline became close with Colin Ward, an artistic confidant and friend to whom her new album, Forever, is dedicated. Madeline comments, “He was my roommate and was the embodiment of that place [Rhinoceropolis] in a lot of ways. We became really close friends there. I was always learning so much from him, about life and being an artist. He was an amazing teacher and friend to me.” When Ward passed away unexpectedly in 2018, she turned towards sound to express the indescribable feelings that partnered with her grief.

These mournful sounds ultimately developed into her new album, Forever. The 6-song LP is a latticework of soft focus guitars and precise melodies– anthems of light piercing through gray clouds of drone. On the track “C.R.F.W.,” we hear Colin Ward reading a poem that speaks of a leaf falling from a tree in autumn: “imagine the way a breeze feels against your leaf body while you finally don’t have to hold on anymore.” Johnston responds with slowly radiating tones, branches stretching out to hold the leaf one last time. “I wanted to write him a letter. I wanted to make something for him in his memory,” Madeline says of Forever.

On Forever, Midwife combines ambient and dream pop into nuanced, reverb-soaked music that is equally haunting and moving

Nocebo, the first full-length by the Boston, Massachusetts five piece Elizabeth Colour Wheel, is inspired by anxiety, the fear and the desire of being constantly overwhelmed. The album came to fruition over the summer of 2018, when the band embraced a heavy “kill your idols” mindset, crafting an album that is distinctly schizophrenic yet familiar, touching on ’90s heavy rock, shoe-gaze, and black metal influences.

Mixed and mastered by Seth Manchester of Machines of Magnets (The Body, Street Sects), Nocebo is a five-walled haunted house, constructed from the wild, chantlike vocals of Lane Shi, the heavy, reverberant guitars of Emmett Palaima and Alice Jackson, the sludgy, distorted bass of Billy Cunningham, and the powerful, aggressive drumming of Connor Devito. Inside these walls frequencies of spectral anger echo and resound, gathering into thunderous waves, which crash against the borders of the room before dying out into eerie silence.

King Woman is fronted by former Whirr vocalist Kristina Esfandiari. The group’s debut 12-inch Doubt unfurls lugubriously, blossoming into a haunting sprawl of crushing, slo-mo miserablism. Imagine some twisted fusion of PJ Harvey, Sunn 0))) and Black Sabbath. Churning washes of crumbling distortion and tar-pit riffage drift grimly through billowing clouds of dense, layered thrum; roiling backdrops for Esfandiari’s throaty, bewitching vocals. The sonic heft is matched by lyrical themes of family and religious abuse, and the suffering borne of both. Esfandiari originally formed King Woman back in 2009, but the band took a backseat to her other projects Miserable and Whirr (with whom she played from 2012 to 2013). Doubt is a follow-up to previous EP releases Dove / Fond Affections (The Native Sound) and Degrida / Sick Bed (Sleep Genius).

For years, fans of Connecticut’s post-industrial doomgaze two-piece Have a Nice Life have restlessly awaited the band’s second gloom-fueled, autobiographical meditation. Now, San Francisco label The Flenser is proud to unleash The Unnatural World. With eight songs clocking in at 47 minutes, The Unnatural World is Have a Nice Life’s most monumental release yet—a colossal, perfectly orchestrated work that leaves listeners comatose on the ground beside their record players. This second full-length delivers doom and gloom at a new level, more focused and soul-tearing than ever. The weight of sound is matched only by the band’s piercingly uncomfortable and personal lyrics dredging up themes of modern legend, religious insecurity and crushing depression. Wave after overwhelming wave will slam listeners down into psychological depths of existentialism and woe. Like its predecessor, the band’s 2008 debut Deathconsciousness, The Unnatural World maintains intensity from quiet lows to staggering highs. No speaker will do it justice and none of you are worthy!

Ragana is a duo whose members alternate duties on drums, guitar, and vocals to produce some of the most unique and affecting dark music in metal today. The two-piece came together in 2011 in the DIY punk scene of Olympia, WA and are now based in Olympia and Oakland, CA. In their time together so far, Ragana have self-released five albums and teamed up with genre-favourite Thou for a split release in 2018. The following year, Ragana released their heralded We Know That The Heavens Are Empty EP and have quietly been working on new music ever since. The band signed with The Flenser in late 2022 and now present their forthcoming debut album for the label, Desolation’s Flower. On Desolation’s Flower, Ragana draws upon a number of influences from the flora and fauna of their Pacific Northwest origins to the darkly nostalgic folk of Mt. Eerie and, yes, their Olympian forebears Wolves In The Throne Room, synthesising them into an experimental, highly idiosyncratic take on black metal. Held together by an intense focus on raw emotion and haunting atmospherics, Ragana shifts seamlessly from tender, mesmerising vocal harmonies to piercing, heart-ripping screams and back again, yielding music that is heavy, beautiful and punishing all at once. Written over the past few tumultuous years, Desolation’s Flower is the band’s most devastating effort to date, containing seven incantations of loss, rage, pain and hope. Expertly engineered by the masterful Nicholas Wilbur at the Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington (Planning For Burial, drowse, Divide and Dissolve, Have a Nice Life), the album serves as the culmination of the past decade plus of the band’s ethos and execution.

Ragana is a duo whose members alternate duties on drums, guitar, and vocals to produce some of the most unique and affecting dark music in metal today. The two-piece came together in 2011 in the DIY punk scene of Olympia, WA and are now based in Olympia and Oakland, CA. In their time together so far, Ragana have self-released five albums and teamed up with genre-favourite Thou for a split release in 2018. The following year, Ragana released their heralded We Know That The Heavens Are Empty EP and have quietly been working on new music ever since. The band signed with The Flenser in late 2022 and now present their forthcoming debut album for the label, Desolation’s Flower. On Desolation’s Flower, Ragana draws upon a number of influences from the flora and fauna of their Pacific Northwest origins to the darkly nostalgic folk of Mt. Eerie and, yes, their Olympian forebears Wolves In The Throne Room, synthesising them into an experimental, highly idiosyncratic take on black metal. Held together by an intense focus on raw emotion and haunting atmospherics, Ragana shifts seamlessly from tender, mesmerising vocal harmonies to piercing, heart-ripping screams and back again, yielding music that is heavy, beautiful and punishing all at once. Written over the past few tumultuous years, Desolation’s Flower is the band’s most devastating effort to date, containing seven incantations of loss, rage, pain and hope. Expertly engineered by the masterful Nicholas Wilbur at the Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington (Planning For Burial, drowse, Divide and Dissolve, Have a Nice Life), the album serves as the culmination of the past decade plus of the band’s ethos and execution.

For something to be “ecstatic,” the feelings and emotions it evokes must transcend what one tends to experience most regularly in their lives. Ecstatic joy isn’t just happiness; it’s a feeling of jubilation which impacts one emotionally and in a metaphysical, arguably spiritual sense too. Although it has long been associated with connotations of the dark and macabre, extreme music has the ability to be a powerful mode of expression for these feelings of absolute bliss, overwhelming love, and awe-inspiring sublimity. Extreme emotions no less and those which black metal quartet Agriculture evokes with its ecstatic subversion of the subgenre’s tropes. What was initially a meeting and subsequent series of jam sessions between Kern Haug and Daniel Meyer, two musicians in the Los Angeles underground noise scene, would eventually manifest as a shared vision to portray the sublimity of the human experience through the vehicle of heavy music. Following the additions of veteran guitarist Richard Chowenhill and bassist / vocalist Leah Levinson to the band’s lineup, this idea would crystalize into the “ecstatic black metal” backbone of AGRICULTURE’s music, first heard on the band’s 2022 debut EP, The Circle Chant. With Agriculture’s self-titled record and first full-length LP, it’s abundantly clear that the band’s use of heavy music to showcase the most resplendent emotions and moments of the human experience has a far deeper meaning. Woven between the flurries of soaring tremolo picking, crescendoing guitar harmonies, celebratory screamed vocals, thoughtful improvisation, and meditative atmospheric passages is the record’s mission statement to experience the wonders and joys of both the esoteric and physical world. For fans of Deafheaven, Liturgy, Këkht Aräkh, Chat

For something to be “ecstatic,” the feelings and emotions it evokes must transcend what one tends to experience most regularly in their lives. Ecstatic joy isn’t just happiness; it’s a feeling of jubilation which impacts one emotionally and in a metaphysical, arguably spiritual sense too. Although it has long been associated with connotations of the dark and macabre, extreme music has the ability to be a powerful mode of expression for these feelings of absolute bliss, overwhelming love, and awe-inspiring sublimity. Extreme emotions no less and those which black metal quartet Agriculture evokes with its ecstatic subversion of the subgenre’s tropes. What was initially a meeting and subsequent series of jam sessions between Kern Haug and Daniel Meyer, two musicians in the Los Angeles underground noise scene, would eventually manifest as a shared vision to portray the sublimity of the human experience through the vehicle of heavy music. Following the additions of veteran guitarist Richard Chowenhill and bassist / vocalist Leah Levinson to the band’s lineup, this idea would crystalize into the “ecstatic black metal” backbone of Agriculture’s music, first heard on the band’s 2022 debut EP, The Circle Chant. With Agriculture’s self-titled record and first full-length LP, it’s abundantly clear that the band’s use of heavy music to showcase the most resplendent emotions and moments of the human experience has a far deeper meaning. Woven between the flurries of soaring tremolo picking, crescendoing guitar harmonies, celebratory screamed vocals, thoughtful improvisation, and meditative atmospheric passages is the record’s mission statement to experience the wonders and joys of both the esoteric and physical world.

Time is a slippery fish.

Loss has inspired Mamaleek’s latest full-length album, titled Vida Blue. This marks the San Francisco Bay Area metal deconstructionists’ eighth album and their third as a full lineup.

Tragedy struck in March of 2023 when the band lost a longtime friend and member, keyboardist Eric Livingston, leaving the group, which began as a duo of two brothers and later expanded to a five-piece, now with only four members. Despite this profound loss, Mamaleek persevered, performing as a quartet at various festivals, including the 2023 edition of Tilburg.

The band returned to the studio to create new material that appropriately reflects their journey through loss and honors their fallen comrade. The resulting album draws inspiration from the legacy of Oakland A’s baseball legend Vida Blue, whose former team coincidentally announced its relocation to Las Vegas that same year. The band members themselves describe this poignant chapter in their own words:

“Time is a slippery fish. Maybe only someone like Vida could grasp it. Although he’s left time behind, his image and that lefty heat remain in the memories of many. Eventually they’ll be forgotten, and hopefully replaced with even more exultant ones. This musical recording is a reflection on loss and its acceptance. We explore several examples for each song, including the loss of pride, of money, of glory, of country, of sanity, of a favorite sports team, of significant others, and, every day, one’s self. It also explores various associated moods—fear, panic, reverence, stoicism, and steadfastness—to arrive at a resolution: Loss is only a test, the glue that holds and erodes each memory, the connection that binds and loosens us all, pitch by pitch, inning by inning. This is your celebration.”

Vida Blue is a person, moment, and memory, together the crystallization of apocalypse: “unveiling,” “disclosure.”

“Wretched Humanity, the fault is yours.” Giles Corey is the gloomy, stripped-down solo project of Dan Barrett, one of the masterminds behind the cult act Have A Nice Life. Dealing with issues like suicide, depression, and the paranormal, Giles Corey is both incredibly bleak and intimate. Two years after the project’s self-titled debut, Barrett recorded three minimalist tracks before a series of live performances, releasing them as Hinterkaifeck. Hinterkaifeck was released in February 2013 by Enemies List Home Recordings, and has existed exclusively as a digital release until now. The title is a reference to a gruesome and mysterious mass murder that took place on a remote farm in 1922 near Munich, Germany. The Flenser presents Giles Corey’s Hinterkaifeck as a one-sided 12-inch record with a special etching on the b-side. “Giles Corey’s Hinterkaifeck is a testament to his ability to wield emotion with his ambience and subtlety.” —Sputnikmusic

Time is a slippery fish.

Loss has inspired Mamaleek’s latest full-length album, titled Vida Blue. This marks the San Francisco Bay Area metal deconstructionists’ eighth album and their third as a full lineup.

Tragedy struck in March of 2023 when the band lost a longtime friend and member, keyboardist Eric Livingston, leaving the group, which began as a duo of two brothers and later expanded to a five-piece, now with only four members. Despite this profound loss, Mamaleek persevered, performing as a quartet at various festivals, including the 2023 edition of Tilburg.

The band returned to the studio to create new material that appropriately reflects their journey through loss and honors their fallen comrade. The resulting album draws inspiration from the legacy of Oakland A’s baseball legend Vida Blue, whose former team coincidentally announced its relocation to Las Vegas that same year. The band members themselves describe this poignant chapter in their own words:

“Time is a slippery fish. Maybe only someone like Vida could grasp it. Although he’s left time behind, his image and that lefty heat remain in the memories of many. Eventually they’ll be forgotten, and hopefully replaced with even more exultant ones. This musical recording is a reflection on loss and its acceptance. We explore several examples for each song, including the loss of pride, of money, of glory, of country, of sanity, of a favorite sports team, of significant others, and, every day, one’s self. It also explores various associated moods—fear, panic, reverence, stoicism, and steadfastness—to arrive at a resolution: Loss is only a test, the glue that holds and erodes each memory, the connection that binds and loosens us all, pitch by pitch, inning by inning. This is your celebration.”

Vida Blue is a person, moment, and memory, together the crystallization of apocalypse: “unveiling,” “disclosure.”

The Promise Of Rain, the sophomore album of the experimental black metal band Scarcity, is an embodiment of the hard-to-believe truth that burdens are easier to bear when distributed, a realization Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble) grappled with extensively while writing this record. This is a sweat-drenched album about dispersion, about spreading, about the collective relieving of burdens through shared experience: one doesn’t have to go through everything alone.

When Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut was written in early 2020, Randall-Myers and vocalist Doug Moore (Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) never expected to be able to play their songs live. The cathartic experience of playing something that came from a place of isolation out to people in a live setting is the root of the intensity in The Promise Of Rain. The Promise Of Rain begins where the craziest climaxes of Aveilut end, and is the first Scarcity record to include Tristan Kasten-Krause (Sigur Ros, Steve Reich, Leya) on bass, Dylan Dilella (Pyrrhon) on guitar and Lev Weinstein (Krallice) on drums. Rather than building density with the quasi-orchestral layering on Aveilut, Scarcity challenged themselves to document what five people in a room could do, recording most of The Promise Of Rain in one or two takes, capturing the physical effort and urgency of a live performance.

Scarcity forges a completely fresh sound in The Promise Of Rain with their alarming guitar work and melodic arpeggiating, shedding dead skin and breaking ground with sheer vulnerability. The lyrics for The Promise Of Rain were inspired by a trip Moore took to the high deserts of southern Utah in 2023. “To thrive in the desert is an act of abnegation—” he observes, “you do right by the land and receive its gifts, or it does away with you.” The necessity of adaptation is as evident in the desert as it is to the landscape of the human experience. The transformation of ideas and beliefs, the grief of losing relationships that had to end, and the fear involved in forming new ones under the grip of mental illness is conjured over and over again on this panoramic album.

The Promise Of Rain, the sophomore album of the experimental black metal band Scarcity, is an embodiment of the hard-to-believe truth that burdens are easier to bear when distributed, a realization Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble) grappled with extensively while writing this record. This is a sweat-drenched album about dispersion, about spreading, about the collective relieving of burdens through shared experience: one doesn’t have to go through everything alone.

When Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut was written in early 2020, Randall-Myers and vocalist Doug Moore (Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) never expected to be able to play their songs live. The cathartic experience of playing something that came from a place of isolation out to people in a live setting is the root of the intensity in The Promise Of Rain. The Promise Of Rain begins where the craziest climaxes of Aveilut end, and is the first Scarcity record to include Tristan Kasten-Krause (Sigur Ros, Steve Reich, Leya) on bass, Dylan Dilella (Pyrrhon) on guitar and Lev Weinstein (Krallice) on drums. Rather than building density with the quasi-orchestral layering on Aveilut, Scarcity challenged themselves to document what five people in a room could do, recording most of The Promise Of Rain in one or two takes, capturing the physical effort and urgency of a live performance.

Scarcity forges a completely fresh sound in The Promise Of Rain with their alarming guitar work and melodic arpeggiating, shedding dead skin and breaking ground with sheer vulnerability. The lyrics for The Promise Of Rain were inspired by a trip Moore took to the high deserts of southern Utah in 2023. “To thrive in the desert is an act of abnegation—” he observes, “you do right by the land and receive its gifts, or it does away with you.” The necessity of adaptation is as evident in the desert as it is to the landscape of the human experience. The transformation of ideas and beliefs, the grief of losing relationships that had to end, and the fear involved in forming new ones under the grip of mental illness is conjured over and over again on this panoramic album.

With the broader adoption of the internet around the turn of the century, how people would engage with and discover underground music would change forever. As a result of the new digital era, DIY was now worldwide, and no band embraced this new frontier better than Have A Nice Life. Formed in 2000 by duo Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, the Middletown, CT-based pair would, throughout the 00s, self-release and share a number of demos and home recordings via early social media channels as well as establish its in-house label Enemies List Home Recordings. These first steps set in motion Have A Nice Life’s rise to renown as an icon of underground music in the internet age, culminating with the release of its pivotal 2008 debut album, Deathconsciousness. Through word of mouth and online discussion, Deathconsciousness became subject to viral praise thanks to its synthesis of bleak post-punk, lo-fi shoegaze, and carpets of hypnotic drone music. Eventually, this humble self-released project would attain the status of a post-internet cult classic, amassing Have A Nice Life a fervent online following that the band would interact with in kind.

In an effort to thank and continue to engage with Have A Nice Life’s internet cult following, Barrett and Macuga would regularly share links to old demos, works in progress, and outtakes from the recording of Deathconsciousness. Over time, a group of fans would compile these demos into an unofficial release. Dubbed Voids, this fan-made compilation several alternate takes of tracks from Deathconsciousness, as well as a handful of early versions of songs that would appear on Have A Nice Life’s two following albums, The Unnatural World and Sea Of Worry. Fans swarmed around this compilation, accompanied by loud calls for it to receive a physical release. A tape pressing of Voids would be released via Music Ruins Lives, a DIY label run by Have A Nice Life superfan Thom Wasluck, also known for his band Planning for Burial. Between both instances of the tape swiftly selling out and the compilation’s long absence from streaming services, Voids has historically been an elusive release to track down, only available in the obscurest corners of the internet or physically on the secondary market at eye-wateringly high prices.

Over a decade since its initial, unofficial release in 2011, The Flenser is proud to reissue Have A Nice Life’s Voids for the first time ever in an official capacity in physical form.

The Flenser is pleased to announce the release of Living Is Easy, the latest EP from ecstatic black metal band Agriculture. This new EP will be paired with the band’s debut EP, The Circle Chant. For the first time, both EPs will be pressed together on a single 12-inch vinyl record as well as a cassette format

Living Is Easy represents a significant new statement from the band. With their debut self-titled, Agriculture embarked on a journey to explore how heavy music can provide insights into the joys of life, both everyday and divine. Their extensive touring with this material led to a profound experience of ecstasy, surpassing expectations as they shared the intensity and joy of these songs with audiences worldwide. This experience was a catalyst for the band, inspiring them to delve even deeper into the realm of “ecstatic black metal” music. They believes that with this release they have pushed this concept to its limit, resulting in a transformative explosion of sound and meaning.

Midwife’s Madeline Johnston has gone through several different iterations of her music project. In 2015, she moved into Denver’s premier DIY space Rhinoceropolis, where she began learning recording on her own and primarily focusing on Sister Grotto, a long-form ambient based project. Working alongside artists like Colin Ward and Dani Rev, she was inspired by her roommate’s tenacity and artistic outpouring. Madeline recorded Born to Lose / Born to Leave, Blindside, and Song For An Unborn Sun during the first half of her residency (before she started the project that would soon become Like Author, Like Daughter).

Time is a major element in this group of recordings. Tracks were played in real time, slowed down, and played on top of, repeatedly, and has been referred to as an ambient sludge record. Components like the Casio Sk-1, endless loop cassettes, delay and pitch shifters distort the passage of time - Layers, repetition, and analogue delay fold it back in on itself.

Not unlike the sentimentality and difficulty distinguishing landmark moments of this time period for Madeline, the music itself is a sort of frenetic and meditative blur.

Some of the tracks on Song For An Unborn Sun were later re-worked for the first Midwife album. Most importantly, “Song For An Unborn Sun” and “Placeholder” which became the song “Way Out.”

Song For An Unborn Sun was originally released as a split in 2016 on the small run cassette label Terrible Pleasures. Side A was by Sister Grotto, and Side B was by Devin Shaffer (who at the time was releasing music under the name Yarrow).

The Flenser 2023 reissue will solely highlight the Sister Grotto material, remastered, along with previously unreleased songs that serve as a timestamp of that particularly magic creative era.

“Placeholder (Slide Edit)” is a postcard from Madeline Johnston and Tucker Theodore’s early collaboration. “Live at Wazee Union” is a recording of a guerrilla show in a former co-op art studio in the process of being demolished and replaced. It was presented and played with the help and additional instrumentation of Braeyden Jae and H Lite’s Anton Krueger. The group created a shrine with about 50 votive candles to set the scene: a temporary refuge from the growing pains of gentrification. “esp” is a play on Song For An Unborn Sun’s closing track, “Hex,” and was made using modified tape loops and field recordings from the industrial neighborhood where Rhinoceropolis once stood.

An early iteration of Madeline Johnston’s Midwife project.

This is the first time Sister Grotto’s Song for An Unborn Son will be released on vinyl

Giles Corey is the gloomy folk-driven solo project from Have A Nice Life mastermind DAN Barrett. Here, Barrett forgoes the post-industrial trappings of Have A Nice Life in favor of an intimate singer-songwriter approach. While thematically related to his other work—dealing with subjects like suicide, death and the paranormal—Giles Corey feels more personal, with impressive shifts from quiet desperation to cathartic outburst. Over the years the album has gained a fervent following, and has sometimes been compared to a religious experience. It is dark yet purgative enterprise not for the frail of heart.

Have A Nice LIFE’s second gloom-fueled, autobiographical meditation. With eight songs clocking in at 47 minutes, The Unnatural World is Have a Nice Life’s most monumental release yet—a colossal, perfectly orchestrated work that leaves listeners comatose on the ground beside their record players. This second full-length delivers doom and gloom at a new level, more focused and soul-tearing than ever.

In 2019, Drowse’s Kyle Bates set out to produce a self-recorded new album. Marked by moving across state lines, long-distance relationships, and deaths in the family, the following years proved to be metamorphic. Now, three years later, he’s emerged with Wane Into It, continuing a distinctly Pacific Northwestern tradition of self-recording indie experimentalists (Grouper, The Microphones, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You). One of the most impactful moments came during the looming passing of a family member. With death expected, the choice was made to conduct a bizarre “living-wake” gathering—with the soon-to-be-deceased in attendance. Shortly after, Bates found himself disturbed, preoccupied with the abstraction of memory. The experience led him to reassess the tool one uses to curate our selective memories: the internet. The internet, which creeped into even more aspects of life during the pandemic, serves as our self-made digital link to the past. Its uncaring presence layered over humbling thoughts of death and his own childhood memories of the Oregon Coast as he worked on Wane Into It; life’s hyperreal texture sank into the recordings as he felt his body age and wane. Big sounds were captured in bedrooms, hallways, practice spaces, forests, and on highways throughout West Coast—vibraphones chime over black metal guitars, a mellotron drones under degraded samples, violins splinter against granular field recordings. In the process of documenting these aural moments Bates completed an MFA at Mills College, coloring the album with shades of avant-electronic and minimalist composition (Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Sarah Davachi etc…). To realize this scope Drowse collaborated with Madeline Johnston (Midwife), Alex Kent (Sprain), Lula Asplund, a chamber ensemble and more. Bates’s songwriting and production have never been more lucid; sounds flicker as he sings with fragile intensity. The record, Drowse’s third for The Flenser, impressionistically distills loss, distance, mystery, prescription drugs, the preservation of memory via recording, and ambient anxiety through its titular act: to Wane Into It, to disappear awaiting the next moon phase, water returning to sea before reemerging as a wave.

In 2019, Drowse’s Kyle Bates set out to produce a self-recorded new album. Marked by moving across state lines, long-distance relationships, and deaths in the family, the following years proved to be metamorphic. Now, three years later, he’s emerged with Wane Into It, continuing a distinctly Pacific Northwestern tradition of self-recording indie experimentalists (Grouper, The Microphones, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You). One of the most impactful moments came during the looming passing of a family member. With death expected, the choice was made to conduct a bizarre “living-wake” gathering—with the soon-to-be-deceased in attendance. Shortly after, Bates found himself disturbed, preoccupied with the abstraction of memory. The experience led him to reassess the tool one uses to curate our selective memories: the internet. The internet, which creeped into even more aspects of life during the pandemic, serves as our self-made digital link to the past. Its uncaring presence layered over humbling thoughts of death and his own childhood memories of the Oregon Coast as he worked on Wane Into It; life’s hyperreal texture sank into the recordings as he felt his body age and wane. Big sounds were captured in bedrooms, hallways, practice spaces, forests, and on highways throughout West Coast—vibraphones chime over black metal guitars, a mellotron drones under degraded samples, violins splinter against granular field recordings. In the process of documenting these aural moments Bates completed an MFA at Mills College, coloring the album with shades of avant-electronic and minimalist composition (Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Sarah Davachi etc…). To realize this scope Drowse collaborated with Madeline Johnston (Midwife), Alex Kent (Sprain), Lula Asplund, a chamber ensemble and more. Bates’s songwriting and production have never been more lucid; sounds flicker as he sings with fragile intensity. The record, Drowse’s third for The Flenser, impressionistically distills loss, distance, mystery, prescription drugs, the preservation of memory via recording, and ambient anxiety through its titular act: to Wane Into It, to disappear awaiting the next moon phase, water returning to sea before reemerging as a wave.

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.

Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.

Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists SCARCITY’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote Aveilut while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early Covid peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience—living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s Covid epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is this grief-stricken release, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare—with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and lyrical focus on the greatness of the void breed raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things outside one’s control, as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. Though born of Randall-Myers and Moore’s intense intimacy with absence, Aveilut is an attempt to present a harrowing universal representation of death’s true form.

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote Aveilut while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early Covid peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience—living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s Covid epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is this grief-stricken release, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare—with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and lyrical focus on the greatness of the void breed raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things outside one’s control, as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. Though born of Randall-Myers and Moore’s intense intimacy with absence, Aveilut is an attempt to present a harrowing universal representation of death’s true form.

Bleeding edge Texas industrialists, Street Sects have completed their long running Gentrification single project with Gentrification V: White Washed. Gentrification, is a five part serial album that began eight years ago as a series of self-released seven inches. Now that your streets have been drained of all color and character, now that the last of the generational holdouts have been forced beneath the wheels, now that history has been torn up, rewritten, injected with fillers, plied with White Claw, passed around and shared by members of the board...are you sleeping more soundly?