(The new album from Hvrt comes out Dec 05… and Andy Synn says you won’t have to wait, or weep, much longer)
I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but I’ve often thought about starting a more Black Metal (or, at least, “blackened”) project of my own, something that sits somewhere between Black Anvil, Black Breath, and Mantar, on the sludgier, punkier side of things… all nasty riffs, gnarly grooves, and stripped-down, hook-heavy songs designed to take no prisoners and take no shit.
There’s only two problems with this, so far:
- Finding the right collaborators has proven difficult, as I just don’t seem to know the right people or have the right contacts (and we’d obviously have to be compatible, both musically and personally);
- Hvrt kind of already got there first.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’d be more than enough room for the both of us (I even have a name picked out, if I can ever get things off the ground) but – considering how much I loved the band’s debut album, The Grief That Feeds the Night (which ended up being one of my favourite albums of 2020) – I’d be at least a little afraid that I’d end up simply copying what they already do so, so well.
And, let me tell you, the upcoming release of Cancerbloom – which I am fortunate enough to have been able to hear in full already – has only exacerbated these concerns, as these are exactly the sorts of songs I’d have loved to have been able to put my own name to.
Take beefy, bullish opener “The Wait, The Weep, The Woe” – a swaggering, stomping, sludge-soaked monster of a track, all massive guitars, meaty bass-lines, and pounding percussion whose rolling kicks and sudden bursts of blastbeats hit you right in the ribcage with an almost physical force – and the chuggy, gut-churning groove ‘n’ grind of “Wohin mit der Scheiße von gestern?” (transl: “What do we do with yesterday’s shit?”), both of which epitomise the band’s lean, mean, all-killer-no-filler approach to songwriting.
And while the more Black Metal side of the band’s sound sometimes feels like it’s taken a bit of a backseat this time around – though there’s still a certain savage, Goatwhore-adjacent grimness to be found when the band cut loose with the blazing blastbeats and blistering tremolo on the likes of “Sie sind hier” and the absolutely face-melting “A Newfound Comfort” – this is more than made up for by the sheer, audacious weight of the band’s buzzing, Entombed-style riffage and staggeringly heavy, irresistibly head-bangable hooks.
That’s not to say the group don’t employ a bit of subtlety and nuance here and there – the morose, Morrisey-esque cleans vocals (look, the man’s a prick, but he was also, at one time, the undeniable voice of a disaffected generation) in “Corporate Serenade”, for example, inject an element of Smith-esque melancholy into the song’s scorching, Tombs-style blackened sludgery, while the doom-laden strains of “Neutronsterne” (one of the album’s many stand-outs) and the climactic title-track (which also incorporates some more of that depressively infectious singing style) prove that the band are just as effective when they take their foot of the gas – it’s just that the first few songs hit you so hard it might take you a few extra minutes to really appreciate that fact.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Cancerbloom and The Grief…, however, is in the overall mood of the music, as whereas the latter felt like more of an existential meditation on matters of loss and anguish, the new album can’t help but deal with more essential, brutally tangible matters – as epitomised by the brutish, punky anthem that is “I Don’t Wanna Die In America” – provoked by the band’s growing disillusionment with a society that no longer seems to care what it has to give up, or who it has to sacrifice, to keep the gears of the great capitalist machine turning for another day.
I’ll grant you that, at around 47 minutes in length, Cancerbloom might just have metastisized a little too far for its own good – it’s not the longest album of the year, by any means, but its predecessor was a tight 35 minutes (and change), so the difference is pretty noticeable – but it’s hard to say what could, or should, have been cut out of the tracklisting as there’s not a single song here that doesn’t have at least something (and, usually, several somethings) to recommend it.
So don’t sleep on this one… it’s a real dark horse candidate that’s bound to throw the proverbial wrench into your “Best of 2025” lists!