Collapse [VINYL]

GRIEF RITUAL are more miserable and even heavier than their name might suggest. Their punishing brand of metalcore twisting blackened metallic hardcore, and the crushing, slower sides of black and death metal to their extremities. On debut album Collapse, the anger, frustration, and disenfranchisement they feel about the UK and wider world are laid bare. Human extinction, capitalism, genocide, ecocide, and the rise of populist right authoritarianism are explored in garish detail across ten tracks. Also put under the microscope are sociopolitical issues such as austerity, racism, misogyny, wealth inequality, gentrification, and eroding human rights, as first written about on their critically acclaimed debut EP Spiritual Disease. Collapse has riffs, beats, and breakdowns that obliterate, and a bass tone fit to tear down the establishment. While dualling vocals from a wide spectrum of extreme metal, and the most sinister and punishing of matte black death metal, bustle to take centre stage across eleven tracks of despotic terror. Collapse was self-recorded, and mixed by the band, alongside Jake Murray (Ill Vision), at Just Noise Audio. With mastering provided by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege Collapse is the follow-up to self-released debut EP Spiritual Disease, which featured in Kerrang, Knotfest, Rock Sound, and, Metal Hammer, being shortlisted for their Album of the Year 2022, who said "Spiritual Disease screams its frustrations with the modern world through a loudspeaker of death metal and hardcore. The bludgeoning breakdowns are interspersed with Entombed-esque tremolo picking and low, guttural roars... (they) rage against the machine louder and more heavily than 99% of their genre peers." The five-track EP, containing singles "Dissolution", "Telluric", and "Immurement", is twenty-minutes of grim, paralysing, cathartic, angry emotion, reminiscent of END, Harms Way, Nails, and early Napalm Death, and was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Joe Clayton (Pijn, Leeched, Curse These Metal Hands) at No Studio. Such a thoughtful, driven, and honest approach has already led to the young band catching the attention of many, with festival appearances at Bloodstock, 2000 Trees, ArcTanGent, 80Trees, and Tech Fest. GRIEF RITUAL have also supported Knocked Loose, Terror, Gatecreeper, END, Fuming Mouth, Heriot, Wiegedood, Ithaca, Inter Arma, and Pupil Slicer, during this busy period, and they passed the one-hundred-show marker in early 2024.