3TEETH: Merchants Of The Void

It’s no secret. The last four years have felt like living in a self-imposed purgatory, like lost souls swimming in fishbowls. Global pandemics, cost of living crisis, geopolitical warfare, and the rest. Humanity is exhausted, and so are industrial metal unit 3TEETH. When they launched their own Metawar upon the world in 2019, they weren’t expecting to write its follow-up less than a year later – and they’re only getting around to releasing it now.

“I think it’s hard to maintain excitement on it when you’ve heard the songs a million times,” sighs vocalist Alexis Mincolla, who’s looking forward to a booster shot of enthusiasm from their upcoming live shows. “If you said the same word over and over again, it loses its meaning and you don’t know what you’re saying anymore, so being able to perceive it through other people’s ears as you release it gives you a fresh perspective.”

Mincolla might’ve grown tired of his own music, but EndEx is by no means an exhausting listen. Its 47 minutes and 12 tracks might as well be the soundtrack to your own movie. Xenogenesis’ sinister, syncopated synths and glitchy growls nudge you into noise metal waters, whilst Slum Planet is your ticket to an all-out aggrotech party at the end of the world, and Drift slips into a shoegaze-induced coma.

So, how does a band bring something so supersized in scope to life? Easy, they up and run. Armed with a 12-page document detailing every inch of the album’s ambiguous concept, Mincolla and his bandmates – bassist Andrew Means, drummer Nick Rossi, guitarist Chase Brawner, and keyboardist Xavier Swafford – retreated to Joshua Tree’s desolate desert.

For Mincolla in particular, it wasn’t just record-shaping, it was life-changing, as he admits the desert “deeply informed this record into new perspectives.” So much so, he’s moved out to the desert permanently. Whilst living in the desert feels like “you’re on a glass marble hurtling through space,” it helped him “separate myself from this leather clad, trident wielding avatar that I created and take audit internally of where I was at as a person.”

“I think that the pandemic did that for a lot of people, when you have a pause that hard and you realise the world has been brought to its knees in such strange ways, it forced us to take internal auditing,” reflects Mincolla, clearly moved by the results of his own self-discovery. By “getting back to more of the basics, getting a little bit more in touch with nature and stuff like that,” it led to songs like Drift, which “you would never even imagine a band like 3TEETH doing a few years ago, whereas now it made sense in the context of the desert as we’re sitting around a campfire with an acoustic guitar and writing a fucking song about how we felt in the moment.”

Drift is just one example of 3TEETH’s newfound vulnerability on EndEx. Whereas Metawar was “caught in a tellurian landscape of socio-political here and now,” EndEx has more of an “off-world perspective, like we’re on a different planet looking back at the Earth.” It trades in the personal more than the political. For one thing, it captures Mincolla’s changing tune on his time in music.

“There was a sense of resignation of being out in the desert, completely removed from everything, and reaching this point of when everything has been protested, and everything has been transgressed, and you go ‘what’s left’ and ‘nothing’s changed anything’,” contemplates Mincolla, who “not to sound like a doomer”, felt like maybe it was time to “get back to focusing on enjoying my time instead of trying to beat my drum about changing things, and realising that you can’t even say anything anymore without being pinned to one side or the other.”

Whilst it sounds like you’re stepping into a nihilistic nightmare, “there’s moments of hope in accepting that sense of being okay with it, and not fearing it, and not letting it control our psychology in a way that we’re constantly operating out of a state of reactive fear, but rather try to enjoy moments, whether they’re fleeting and everything is dying, it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the now.” Simply read: EndEx is a life lesson we could all do with learning.

Like a homemade trifle, EndEx is layer upon layer of delicious meaning for you to unpack and deconstruct. Every song was mapped out on a nine foot tall, 12-page document. “It starts under the earth, this idea of Xenogenesis being the spell to break apart from our past, and separate ourselves from the generational traumas, that we continue to break those cycles starting here on Earth and working its way all the way up.”

In many ways, listening to EndEx is like cutting a hole in the ceiling of the glass dome society has been stuck under for four years and regaining your thoughts. Aided by songs like Merchant Of The Void, it’s an “allegorical approach on a quantum critique of capitalism in general as fucking weird as that sounds.” But it’s not all doom and gloom at the end of the day, 3TEETH just want “to confuse people, like hey, here’s a quantum critique on technical accuracy but it should be played in a strip club; some people will take it at surface level and some people will think there’s a lot more being said here.”

EndEx is out now via Century Media Records.

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