(Rotten Sound’s new EP Mass Extinction comes out December 12th on Season of Mist, and in a rare attempt to get ahead of the game, DGR sent in the following review.)
Rotten Sound’s cycle of album and then EP continues unabated for the third time running with the upcoming release of their eight-song auditory assault known as Mass Extinction.
In classic Rotten Sound fashion, they waste absolutely no time in getting going and also have little care for making a song that even bothers clearing the two-minute mark. Sub-ten minutes of fiery grind are on offer here, split off from the grander chaos of the group’s 2023 Apocalypse sessions and made whole as part of a package that songwriting-wise is a little more scattershot, but manages to hit just as hard as the album that preceded it.
It goes without saying that Rotten Sound have continued to be one of the more straight-shooting pillars of the grind scene over the years and any excuse to sit down with one of their bona-fide blastbeat batterings is a good one. Apocalypse stuck pretty close to the tried-and-true for the Rotten Sound crew and it will come as no surprise, then, that Mass Extinction continues that march into oblivion, just with a slight bit more taste for the two-step now that it is a little more free to stretch its wings than Apocalypse’s unrelenting assault would’ve allowed.
photos by Anna Martynenko
Nine minutes and a ‘fuck you’ coda is admittedly luxurious spa treatment by grindcore standards. Sometimes it can feel like you wait decades for a band to put out new material, then to suddenly have them resurface and go “here you go, six minutes of new work across seventeen songs on a split with Agothocles, see you at the heat death of the universe pricks!” Rotten Sound pretty rigidly sticking to the schedule of an album and two years later an EP for their last three full-length’s is almost enough caring treatment to make me wonder if they’re gearing up to propose to us some time soon.
Mass Extinction is constructed out of material left from 2023’s Apocalypse release so they run in a pretty similar vein. It goes without saying that if you really enjoyed that album then you’ll probably like this EP just as much. As mentioned, the music is a little more scattershot across different moods but Rotten Sound do the work to ballet their way through the many grindcore riffs and staples available to them for nine minutes of auditory fury with little room to breathe. It even checks off my yearly “one of these albums is going to have the Jim Jones sample on it” bingo card for heavy metal this year. Likewise, it is sometime enough that we get the chance to hear Sami Latva smash his way through a drumkit again, as those blasts are wound so tight it feels like even the slightest variation is going to cause something to snap and go shooting through a wall close by.
The joke that we’re fond of making around here is that no band is more befitting the “short but sweet” article tag than Rotten Sound and their propensity for EP releases. It is likely that by the time you’ve reached this paragraph the EP itself will either be three-fourths or completely finished. Nine minutes is a compact amount of time and, as also mentioned, there isn’t a single song here that could give a shit about clearing the two minute mark. In fact, EP closer “Mass Extinction” pressing itself against the window of it is almost ridiculously indulgent in comparison to the forty-five seconds of “Ride The Future” before it.
Instead, Mass Extinction plays out as if the songs are a relentless assault for the most part — song starts, song ends, and you almost don’t notice because Rotten Sound are the masters of the post-Y2K rage against current society and all of its tempter-tantrums in music form. For all the exhortations to “wake up” that took place on Apocalypse back in 2023, Mass Extinction gives the impression that Rotten Sound feel – and rightfully so – as if we haven’t accomplished a fucking thing since.
Naturally there is a sense of familiarity when it comes to Mass Extinction but that arises largely because Rotten Sound are speaking the most blatant, blasted from a bullhorn, version of the grindcore language they could possibly use here. It’s a pure and virulently hot style of music that trades just as much on passion and slop as it does any sense of articularity. Mass Extinction is like the last handful of Rotten Sound releases; it is a musical strafing run that leaves the world behind as nothing but scarred ground. The sense of activisim and snot-nosed “fuck you” run hand-in-hand together here, and Rotten Sound have been long-tenured pros in doing both.
Mass Extinction is a nine-minute rail crash of an EP. You almost don’t notice it ending because the severing of the last song is so sudden before you’re spilled into either a repeat listen or the next Rotten Sound release picks up. You’re here because you know that Rotten Sound have the art of frenetic annihilation down to a science and you want to be a witness to the next demonstration of them practicing what they know so well. Mass Extinction more than answers that call.
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