Born in Massachusetts in the year 2022, Compress released a debut demo that same year that got tagged most prominently with black metal, crust punk, and hardcore. It’s well worth tracking down (you’ll find it here), as long as you’re ready to be pounded into jelly and scared out of your mind.
That demo was and still is a ruinously intense experience, viscerally slaughtering and mentally combustive, accented by doses of apocalyptic harsh noise in case your brain hadn’t already been sufficiently sliced and seared.
Anyone who ran into that demo, and got run over by it, will experience fearful thrills from the news that Compress are now back, with a debut EP entitled The Final Level of Consciousness that’s set for a March 15th release by Eternal Death. And it’s that pulverizing and petrifying album that’s the source of the song named “Formosus” we’re now premiering.
In a word, “Formosus” is monstrous. In more words, it’s a genre-bender that broils the mind and crushes bones, creates sensations of terrible tension, nightmarish fear, and ruinous pile-driving destruction. It’s also a neck-wrecker that’s heavy enough to open sinkholes in grimy streets.
Compress start coiling the tension with a dense and dissonant miasma of guitar psychosis, a sonic acid-bath that sears the senses above the throb of a bass that sounds like it was recorded in a giant sewer pipe fathoms below the surface and drums that go off like gunshots.
The gunfire accelerates, the enormous throb of the bass becomes manic, and the guitar-intensity builds to nerve-shattering levels, finally broken by riffing that sounds like jackhammers gone mad and titanic low-end punch, interspersed with wretched wailing tones.
The riffing seethes again, the drums blast away, and a lead guitar feverishly swirls at the conjunction of pain and delirium. The band’s hardcore roots also emerge, but it’s punk on a gargantuan scale, stomping right through the floor, right up until the song devolves into sandstorm-feedback.
As if all that weren’t scary enough, Connor Dooley‘s vocals are a nightmare all their own, ranging from abominable abyssal roars to lycanthropic howls and the kind of screams that make you imagine a man being flayed alive.
Eternal Death will release this new EP on cassette tape and digital formats via Bandcamp, where you can pre-order now and also listen to the EP’s opening track, “Fissured Cosmos“, which sounds like what you’d expect from that title. But the track is also built around a pulsing riff that’s fiendishly infectious. It stitches together sounds of the end of creation.
Oh hell, we’ll include that stream below, along with the links.
We’ll also mention that Compress will perform a tape-release gig on March 15th with Anthropophagous, I Destroyer, and labelmates Ritual Clearing at The Nook in Westfield, Mass. That should be a hell of a show. Hope they’ve got contractors on speed-dial who can repair foundations and re-paint blistered walls.
PRE-ORDER:
https://eternaldeath.bandcamp.com/album/the-final-level-of-consciousness
COMPRESS:
https://compress.bandcamp.com/album/demo-i
https://www.instagram.com/compresswmass/