AN NCS PREMIERE: HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE — “LOSS”

Sep 092024

(written by Islander)

On August 20, 2017, the day before a total solar eclipse I was about to witness in Wyoming, I wrote about a song I had heard the night before by a Canadian band named Hell Is Other People (it was the title track to their album Embrace, which came out about 10 days later). But over the course of many paragraphs before ever getting to the song I wrote about the band’s name, and about the alcohol-fueled discussion of it that took place among my friends and me under the stars that night.

I won’t put you through all those paragraphs again (they’re here if you want to read them), even though the discussion meant a lot to me then and still does. I’ll just mention that the band’s name is a famous statement from the play No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre, and it’s an assertion that’s subject to many interpretations, about the many ways in which other people can make life hell for us, or cause us to make our own lives into a hell.

Still grateful to this band for that night, today I’m going to get to their music a lot faster, because we’ve got a song to premiere from their new album Moirae, which comes a long seven years after Embrace. One thing that hasn’t changed over those many years is this band’s capacity to be thought-provoking — and to pierce through into the heart of where our emotions come from.

Here’s what Hell Is Other People tell us about their new album:

“Moirae is an Ancient Greek term referring to three figures that are personifications of destiny. The role of the Moirae is to ensure that everyone lives out their destiny as assigned to them by the laws of the universe. We explore this necessary human process of birth, proliferation and death through these songs, couched in metaphor and esoteric meaning so the listener can interpret them as they see fit.”

And here’s what the band’s label Transcending Obscurity Records tells us:

“Hell is Other People from Canada have elegantly and passionately crafted a black metal album that imbibes influences from several of its related subgenres such as atmospheric black metal, post-black metal and even DSBM in parts, forming a cohesive, expressive and all-encompassing sound that the band is comfortable in carrying throughout. The band goes about playing these intuitively structured songs with a palpable burning fervour which makes all the difference.”

The song from Moirae we’re premiering today is “Loss“. It’s the fourth of five songs on the album. Before you get to it, you’ll experience tracks that ferociously capture the striving of mortals to overcome the constraints of the Moirae, resulting in the ruin of all they once held dear.

The song is indeed deeply steeped in a feeling of loss, but this isn’t the quiet grief of someone huddled alone in an empty room. The guitars are gritty in tone and tormented in mood, roiling as they rise and fall. The bass feverishly throbs (but muses too), the drums hammer like an overdriven heart, and the screaming and wailing vocals are cutting enough to leave scars.

The riffing is dense and submersive, an electrifying channel flooding with torment and despair, but also a channel of yearning and anguish. As the rhythm section change what they’re doing (the bass being a particularly attention-seizing and contrasting presence), the guitars continue rising and falling, always vibrating and always clawing at the mind until, near the end, they begin to sound like a mass of ringing chimes, wondrous but desperate and discordant, and more than a little hallucinatory too.

Here the music of Hell Is Other People is emotionally and sonically scarring, a wrenching expression of torment and pain, of confusion and futility, and yet there’s also something poignant as well as ruinous in the grief it expresses.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE are:
Nathan Boots – Guitar
Nicholas Luck – Guitar
Nathan Ferreira – Bass, Vocals
James Ditty – Drums

The great cover art for Moirae was made by Adam Burke (Nightjar Illustration). T.O. will release the album on gatefold vinyl LP, digipack CD, and digital formats, with lots of apparel and other merchandise options. They recommend the album for fans of Agalloch, Altar of Plagues, Winterfylleth, White Ward, and Drudkh, but one might also mention Gaerea, Isis, and Amesours.