(Andy Synn contemplates chaos, and genre tags, with the new album from Defacement)

The genre tag “Post-” – as in “Post-Rock”, “Post-Hardcore”, “Post-Black Metal”, etc – is one of the most maligned (and often misunderstood) terms in music (according to some of the comments I’ve seen, anyway).

The thing is, while the initial idea behind “Post-Rock” was to take the fundamental elements of the genre – the distorted, crunchy guitars, the heavy, hooky rhythms, the bombastic, larger-than-life melodies – and separate them from their traditional structures and conventional constraints, allowing for more expansion, more experimentation, and more dynamic depth (especially in terms of pushing the classic “quiet/loud” dynamic even further) that’s often not how the “Post-” prefix has come to be used in recent years.

Let’s face it, the term “Post-Hardcore” is often just as synonymous with “Melodic Hardcore”, while a lot of “Post-Black Metal” artists are just Black Metal bands stealing directly from the tropes of “Post-Rock” (or vice-versa), and too many people in general just seem to use the term “Post-” when they actually mean something like “Progressive”, “Atmospheric”, or “Avant-Garde” (and we can argue about what those terms mean another time).

So perhaps we need to think of another way to talk about a band like Defacement – who have been wilfully and unapologetically deviating from the formula since 2018 – that properly reflects their ongoing attempts to deconstruct extremity in order to let something new, or at least something else, fill the gaps.

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(Andy Synn shares some words of wisdom, and warning, about the duplicitous, dichotomous, and devastating new album from Defacement)

Everyone knows that the common trajectory for bands is for them to get mellower and more melodic – maybe a little proggier, here and there, but still more accessible overall – as their career goes on.

But what the hell would such a transition even sound like in the context of a band like Defacement?

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