We’re honored and excited to bring you the second full-length album by recluse industrial black metal/harsh noise abusers american (which the band stylizes lowercase). This is especially a heartfelt release for SR as american were one of the earliest ever bands we worked with back in 2014 (our fourth ever “signing” to be exact), and their debut album we released on cassette - Coping With Loss - was a cornerstone point of no return for us, and probably the first release to make the SR name surface out of complete obscurity, and which first realistically circulated the label’s vision among total strangers for the first time ever.
Hailing from Richmond, Virgina, american are a mysterious raw black metal/industrial/sludge duo fully committed to the torments and un-comfort of total oblivion and obscurity. No live activity and an existence at the borderline of everything have turned this band into a frightening enigma. Influenced by such revolutionary and genre-defying acts as The Body, Leviathan, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Craft, Godlflesh, and Blut Aus Nord, american play a blown out, disembodied, torturous and completely fucking annihilated blend of delirious hardcore punk, sludge, black metal, industrial, and noise, creating songs that ooze of almost implausible negativity and bask in ruinous self-destruction. The duo write and record everything at home on their own and have thus far released a frightening debut self-titled demo and a split with the ambient band Crone to which they contributed three tracks. Noticing their diseased and self-destructive craft early on, a then embryonal and completely unknown Sentient Ruin worked with the band in 2014 to release their debut album - Coping With Loss - on cassette, the first ever release for the label to garner any press attention or recognition, and which established the imprint as a credible force. Coping With Loss was a scary and hermetic album which introduced the world to a band being literally devoured by its torments and by its own deviated emotions, and which made listeners gasp in disbelief at the sheer cruelty of the duo’s music, with the likes of Noisey claiming that american’s music “takes you into a world of pain”, and makes you “beg to whoever you believe in to kill you”, CVLT Nation explaining that their music “advocates suicide”, and Invisible Oranges further explaining that their music “is blessed with a haunting aura thick with loathing”.
Building further upon the ill foundations of their castigating and sadistic debut album, american have finally birthed - after three years spent in total seclusion - the inevitable and astonishing nightmare that it their second album. With Violate and Control american have reached a new zenith in musical depravity, and carved an even deeper wound into the American extreme metal underground with their own brand of crazed, sadistic, and raw industrial black metal. Reaching depths of emotional collapse and of musical abuse that barely seem graspable, american’s new creation will leave old fans of the band and new admirers alike horrified by the sheer cruelty reached in this new work, and disgusted by the band’s mindless and lawless evolution into complete and triumphant aural perversion. While their most iconic traits comprised of face-tearing screams, swarming black metal guitars, barbarically obsessive drum machines, and a humiliating barrage of power electronics and pedal abuse remain, with Violate and Control american have also pushed themselves and their wretched craft to often repellant absurds, leaving the listener blindsided and helpless to witness the band literally disembowel their emotions and imagination from within, with a jagged and dull blade made of delirious sonic sadism. Within Violate and Control’s blunt and soulless sonic inhumanity one will find the true distilled essence of self-loathing and of total sensorial mutilation, embodied as ten tracks of absolutely magnificent sonic abhorrence that hideously bring together the abyssal darkness of black metal bands like Leviathan and Ash Borer, the earth-shaking noise abuse of Bastard Noise and The Body, and the glacial magnificence of blackened noise sound sculptors like Sutekh Hexen, Locrian, and Wold.
CVLT Nation is now streaming the first track extrapolated from this visionary and wretched work - check out the noise-infested black metal delirium of Amorous and Subdued HERE.
Featuring disturbingly beautiful art made for the band by abstract collage visionary øjeRum, Violate and Control will see the light on June 30 2017 as LP/Cassette/Digital through Sentient Ruin in partnership with Fragile Branch Recordings (also US LP/Cassette) and Shove (EU LP) - pre-orders are now live on our Bandcamp, or store.