We’ve been avidly following UK-based Allfather since their first EP release in 2015, sort of like a dog madly chasing after a semi-truck and hoping not to get run over. As our own Andy Synn wrote in the context of reviewing their last album, 2018’s And All Will Be Desolation, their music has been “heavy and heartfelt,” the kind of experiences “where you can practically feel every ounce of blood and sweat and tears” that go into their creation.
And let’s underscore heavy, because their Sludge-injected, Hardcore-inflected, proto-Death Metal sound has been potent and punishing. Getting run over and flattened by the music has always been a serious risk.
In the years since that last album, and especially during the last two years, the world seems to have rapidly been descending into a burning cesspool. With an active moral and political conscience, Allfather could not help but react to that in the music they’ve made. They wrote and recorded a new album named A Violent Truth across these last two years of “global pandemics, increasing oppression, and the slow creep of contemporary fascism”, and (to quote further from their label’s preview) “the album captures and distills the pent-up fear, anger, and exhaustion of living in desperate and seemingly hopeless times”. Continue reading »