AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): INERTH — “HYBRIS”

“Idiosyncratic” is a good word for the music of the Spanish band Inerth, whose 2022 debut album Void drew influence from such divergent forebears as Godflesh, Napalm Death, Neurosis, Celtic Frost, Amebix, and Killing Joke.

To varying degrees, a lot of those influences can still be detected in their follow-up EP Hybris, which we’re premiering today, perhaps most especially Godflesh, but while these four new songs can still be considered a stylistic hybrid, they also sound more cohesive.

As you’ll see, we couldn’t resist the temptation to consider the songs one by one, but for the impatient among you we’ll offer this summing up of what you’re getting yourselves into:

The hallmarks of Hybris are compulsive grooves of bridge-collapsing and muscle-moving power; music of madness and mayhem that puts nerves on edge, coupled with episodes of crushing hopelessness; a vocal tandem that creates a gripping contrast; and an overarching atmosphere of human calamity, for which we have no one to blame but ourselves.

There’s nothing cheerful or hopeful about Inerth‘s song titles on the new EP. The name of the opener is “Midlife Wasteland“. It’s announced by a recital of famous words uttered by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose own creation of a midlife wasteland is legendary. After those hopeless words, Inerth set the drums to rumbling and their enormous bass to growling. Other instruments begin screeching and screaming, putting nerves on edge, a prelude to maliciously gnashing riffage and monstrous bellows.

As the song unfolds it continues to get muscles twitching, the low end still sounds like the earth is shaking itself apart, and shrill guitars continue sticking needles under the skin, but the vocals shift to singing, a kind of haunting but silken wail. By the end, the music moans and throbs, a fitting finale to a sinew-moving and mind-shearing catastrophe.

After hearing that opener, you might wonder what Inerth will do in a song named “Oblivion“, since oblivion has already been a centerpiece. What they do is open up a cold and frightening sonic void in which wraiths seem to quiver in their agony, and then they introduce a high-toned riff that dementedly squirms and darts above humongous pounding in the depths.

This time, the strident singing comes first, ringing with clarity, followed by the ravenous growls and spear-strikes of ringing fretwork dissonance. But Inerth are full of surprises, and so they segue from catastrophic heaviness back into a mysterious audio void where glinting strings reverberate and seem to beckon.

Building back toward greater heaviness, the drums go off like tumbling gunshots, the bass rumbles and grumbles, and the music abrasively churns and convulses, with a manically writhing lead guitar in the midst of it. Inerth return to the amalgam of crushing and mind-bending sensations that opened the song, and you’ll probably find that it already got its deleterious hooks in your head.

Fentanyl is its own oblivion, and “Fentanyl” is the next song in the EP’s ruinous but thrilling cavalcade. For this one, Inerth waste no time triggering their listeners’ muscles and beginning to plow through concrete like a demolition machine. No singing in this one, just ferocious, belly-deep growls and grunts, neck-snapping snare work, and brute-force mauling.

The band do slow the charge to make the experience more doomed and oppressive, and they again bring out an immediately head-hooking guitar-lead, which seems to swirl in misery before Inerth start ruthlessly slugging like pile-drivers.

Finally, we have “A.I.“, a title that’s not necessarily hopeless, depending on your perspective, but one would guess that Inerth don’t see it as a promising technological development but instead a self-inflicted wound with apocalyptic potential. Or at least that’s the kind of feeling you’ll probably get from the music…

…because the music is a slowly stalking and stomping sonic behemoth that seems to bray in confusion and pain. There’s more singing in this closer, but it sounds wretched, and the guitars ring like a siren — too late to save us.

You’ll know by now that Inerth like to switch things up, and they do it again in “A.I.“, with the drums accelerating into clobbering speed and the riffing vigorously chewing and ringing in madness. The lead guitar sounds hallucinatory, as ephemeral and unsettling as the grooves are viscerally punishing. Reverberating spoken-words and gruesome roars portend disaster, and a swell of static seems like radioactive fallout — with everything suddenly cut short by the blade of extinction.

INERTH is:
Santiago – vocals
Makoko – guitars
Víctor – guitars & synths
Ramón – bass
Moya – drums

Hybris was produced by Inerth and Javier Ustara. It was recorded, mixed, and mastered Mpire studio by Javier Ustara, with vocals recorded at The Ocean studio by Brais Landeira.
It features frightening cover art by Giancarlo Melgar, and layout and design by ViolentSatanicGrinders.

Hybris will be released on July 5th internationally by the Abstract Emotions label on 12″ vinyl format, and it’s also available digitally from the band.

PRE-ORDER:
https://abstractemotions.com
https://inerth.bandcamp.com/album/hybris-ep

INERTH:
https://www.facebook.com/INERTHband/
https://www.instagram.com/inerth_band
https://inerth.bandcamp.com