(written by Islander)
Miserable and merciless, doomed and depraved, an exorcism of inner demons. Those are among the descriptions you may have seen if you’ve come across the news about a new album from Chicago-based Stomach. You may have also seen the album’s name: Low Demon. And man, is it ever that.
The album will be released this coming Friday by Hibernation Release. It will likely turn the end of the week into a smoking crater, from which horrid smoking things will crawl. But hell, why wait to see what happens? Let’s see what happens today. There’s no good reason to let this week pretend to have a positive start (we know better than to be fooled that way), and so we’ll drop Low Demon on your heads right now.
photo by Britt Crowe
If you don’t know, Stomach is the sludge/doom vehicle for two experienced operators — drummer/vocalist John Hoffman (Weekend Nachos, Ledge) and guitarist Adam Tomlinson (Sick/Tired, Sea Of Shit), who previously played together in the very first Weekend Nachos lineup.
They’ve previously released two demo tapes and a full-length monstrosity named Parasite, and they’ve also evolved into a live three-piece with the addition of bassist Kirk Syrek (Sick/Tired, Exalted). And now comes Low Demon, forty minutes of punishment across five tracks, including the truly massive closer “Shivers // Drafts“.
Those descriptive terms three paragraphs ago weren’t exaggerations. Stomach‘s comfort zone on Low Demon is your discomfort zone. As they exorcise their own fiends they introduce you to them, and leave ruin and wreckage in their wake.
The band reveal some fundamentals of their current modus operandi in the album opener “Dredge“, which does indeed sound like a titanic crawler that’s gouging a deep scar in the earth, and dredging up emotional horrors too.
The catastrophic gouging in the low end is immensely distorted and overpowering; what’s happening in the upper elevations sounds like the strings are screaming as they writhe. The groaning and droning vibrations feel like they’re going to loosen our teeth, and our bowels. Every now and then the drums make a countdown. Every now and then a ruined voice vomits up agony.
After that, “Bastard Scum” almost feels like a reprieve, in that it’s more of a song than the pitch-black nightmare given the name “Dredge“. The humongous abyssal heaving that occurs is still so brutally distorted that it feels capable of shredding away concrete, but it does create a slowly lurching groove, and eventually the riffing renders a dismal blood-congealing throb.
In this song those countdown drums make more frequent appearances and also punch like a battering ram, and the blood-raw vocals bay and scream and scrape nearly all the way through, interspersed with cacophonous conversations and proclamations.
photo by Britt Crowe
Mercy is a foreign concept not only in this song but in every other one. The vocals are shattering throughout, the pain of being turned inside out made plain. In the shrill frequencies within the tracks, pain and madness also find release. They pierce the mind with wretched wails and caustic feedback. Sometimes the concrete-crushing low frequencies dominate the proceedings, as they do in a phase of the gruesomely undulating “Get Through Winter” — just before Stomach punch the accelerator for the first time, as the drums hammer with feral punk energy and the riffing drives into a massively destructive surge.
That song’s not the only time when Stomach shift their monster machine into a higher gear, and it’s a welcome display of dynamism. When they’re in the usual slow lane, the effects are so brutally traumatic that you might wonder whether you’ll make it to the end with mind and body at least rudely intact. And in fact, “Oscillate” finds an even higher gear than the outbursts in “Get Through Winter“; it’s just sheer bomb-dropping, bullet-spitting, quarry-excavating chaos at first — followed by a dose of feedback-induced agony and earth-shaking brontosaurian heaviness.
Nope, no mercy at all. By the time you get to that afore-mentioned closing track (and I hope you’ll last that long), you really may be wondering how Stomach could think their listeners would be able to survive more than 17 uninterrupted minutes of what they do.
Make no mistake, “Shivers // Drafts” is 17+ minutes of pavement-splitting, gut-wrenching, mind-mauling hell. It’s worth witnessing in part because Stomach somehow make it an even more apocalyptic experience than what’s come before. There are things going on in the song’s stratosphere that are frighteningly unearthly, apparitional in their screaming radiations, while the low end sounds like a field recording of a black hole at the center of the earth sucking all the mantle above it into its gaping maw.
Stomach do other things in that massive and massively oppressive song too, threading the choking feedback loops and crushing beats with a repeating motif of surreal moaning misery. Eventually, they seem to be circling back to the pure nightmare dimension of “Dredge” — no beats, no voices, no light at all, and eventually no sound (though something horrible is in fact waiting for you after a stretch of dead silence).
Here is what John Hoffman has shared with us about the album:
“Low Demon is a journey into a deeper, darker hell. With Parasite and the two demo tapes prior, I was unleashing a lot of demons, as I always do when I write music, but it was more raw. I wouldn’t call Low Demon raw at all. This is an attempt to combine some further artistry to create more of a nightmarish setting.”
Low Demon was recorded by John Hoffman during the winter of 2024 at The Pit II in Geneva, Illinois, and it was mixed and mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios (The Body, Magrudergrind, Fugitive).
The album will be released on July 18th, digitally and on both Black and limited Red LP pressings. Preorders are live at the Hibernation Release webshop and Bandcamp via the links below.
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.hibernationrelease.com/product/stomach-low-demon-lp
https://stomachdoom.bandcamp.com/album/low-demon
STOMACH:
https://www.instagram.com/stomachdoom
HIBERNATION RELEASE:
https://www.facebook.com/hibernationrelease
https://www.instagram.com/hibernationrelease