Richmond, VA-based harsh industrial metal deconstructors Hold Me Down reanimate their design for total sonic retaliation through their latest creation, "Powerless", a debut full-length offering of caustic post-industrial punishment and complete sensorial undoing which follows brilliantly in the steps of their transformative 2019 Sentient Ruin-issued self-titled demo tape.
The album has been unveiled officially by iconic Industrial outlet ReGen Magazine, who’ve premiered the music video for the song “STK” stating that the band’s video is a “frenetic visual accompaniment for the song’s mix of dissonant electronics, discordant guitars, and demonic vocalizations” - you can check out the feature and song/video HERE.
As is now commonplace with bands and their releases associated with Sentient Ruin, an aura of ambivalence, reverence and transformation enshrouds this work, with the echoes of legendary industrial acts like Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Godflesh and Swans reverberating from the past and undergoing a future-projecting metamorphosis, as present time contaminants (power electronics, blackened noise, death industrial) enter the picture in an aberrant recombination of stylistic DNA, paving the way to groundbreaking and grim sonic transfigurations. Throughout its ten cold bursts of synthetic mechanized dissolution Hold Me Down explore concepts of withdrawal, personal failure, societal fracture and emotional unravelling through a bleak post-industrial disassociation where disorienting drum machines, vitriolic metal guitars, bleak soundscapes and oppressive electronics instigate a depersonalizing collapse within the listener. As the album's title suggests, the medium of harsh and sensorially annihilating industrial synthesis is the centerpiece to this new work, wielded by the band as a dissociative means, or as a schematic to the dismantling of the listener, who ultimately must be rendered powerless, nothing more than an empty reflection of its surroundings and existence, with the music acting as its cold and implacable ruiner. A bleak projection of reality emerges from this design, boring through consciousness with surgical precision to destroy it from within, leaving nothing but a smoldering wreckage in its wake.
Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, Hold Me Down emerged from the local industrial and art metal scene when vocalist and noise musician Jim Gullickson linked up with local industrial musicians David Hoefer and Ben Rinehardt who around then had just begun laying the foundations for their next endeavor. Gullickson had just put on hold is previous band, black/sludge/industrial duo and early Sentient Ruin alumni AMERICAN, and in order to keep his momentum going was looking for the next outlet to give voice to his creative impulses and passion for underground industrial. The band debuted unleashing a punishing blight of mechanized death and throbbing industrial in the form of their self-titled 2019 debut Sentient Ruin demo tape, a deadly revisitiation of the sounds pioneered by iconic machinists such as Godflesh, early Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and SWANS, but with a modern, deconstructed edge. The quickly sold out demo tape featured seven tracks of total nihilism sequenced and synthesized to pound and drone to the beat of inhumanity, while subtle touches of harsh noise, power electronics, and black metal amalgamated in the mix completed a sonic assault of absolutely mind-defiling cruelty. This release cemented the band’s sound and laid the groundwork for their annihilating debut full-length LP “Powerless”, also released by Sentient Ruin on MC/LP/digital formats in mid 2022.