INTRODUCING: Contention
“We only really aspired to be a local band in the beginning.” How many times have you heard that one before? A group of mates get together, put out three or four songs, play a few shows and move on with their lives. Often that’s exactly how it goes, but sometimes the scene has other ideas – sometimes a band is too good to slip through the cracks and before you or even they know it they’ve got multiple releases to their name and perhaps even made it to a debut full-length. This is where we find CONTENTION and their vocalist Cosmo Vidussi, their debut LP Artillery From Heaven about a month old at the time of our conversation and having firmly cemented the Tampa, Florida outfit’s reputation as one of the best straight edge metalcore bands of that scene’s current renaissance.
“Obviously it’s ARKANGEL worship in some ways,” offers Cosmo on the album’s classic sound. “But in all genres you have the benefit of looking at the last 30 years of a genre and picking what you liked from it. At the time, EARTH CRISIS didn’t have that. They were picking from stuff that was in E standard and they were pulling from metal because there wasn’t exactly that sort of sound yet and they were creating it. Now we can look back and be like ‘yo, we don’t need this’ or ‘we don’t want to do this part’.”
Admittedly, that part of the process is led by Cosmo’s bandmates – guitarists Bayly Branson and Josh Howell, drummer Lucas Pereyra and bassist D’Angelo Casanas – so there is no ego when he explains how impressed he was that they were able to graduate to the longer format of a full-length and remain every bit as compelling as they were on their demo or 2021’s outstanding Laying Waste To The Kingdom Of Oblivion EP. Cosmo’s contributions come later, with most of his lyrics written as stand-alone poems and then tweaked and tailored to fit the tracks as necessary. They’re no less central though, the vocalist’s desperate rasp and apocalyptic writings being two of the features that mark CONTENTION out most of all.
“I grew up listening to bands like FOUNDATION and EARTH CRISIS and shit where there’s awesome parts of those songs but the lyrics are really what sell me on that music,” elaborates Cosmo. “I’m always trying to make lyrics that resonate with people and stand out because there’s so many bands that are awesome – especially like death metal that I really fuck with, I love some of that music – but you can’t pick out a single set of lyrics… I like sing-alongs. I like pile-on parts and that’s what I strive for, because I grew up at the bottom of the fucking dog pile getting ten sweaty fat dudes on top of me trying to grab the mic. That’s what I’m there for so I want to recreate that experience for everyone.”
“I’ve always really been interested in the worst part of warfare, like nuclear warfare and the end of days type shit,” he continues on the inspiration behind what the band have described as an ‘apocalyptic straight edge album’. “I grew up watching movies like that, but also video games like Fallout and [Command & Conquer] Red Alert 2 and shit like that when I was a really little kid, all that stuff where it’s kind of centred around horrible apocalyptic scenarios. I’ve always been really influenced by that stuff and I always wanted to make a conceptual record like that. This is the first time I’ve ever done an LP with any band, so I really was looking forward to a theme that’s like an overarching thing.”
Indeed, it is often true that the best straight edge bands don’t actually sing or shout about being straight edge. There are plenty of links and metaphors in Artillery From Heaven and of course the seemingly ever more inevitable demise of man has often been quite a natural extension of a subculture that has always concerned itself with things like survivalism and environmentalism, but Cosmo isn’t trying to convert anybody. “At the end of the day it’s your own life. I think it’s really lame to proselytise. I don’t want anybody to become straight edge because I told them to, I think telling anybody to do anything is bad in my book and to be avoided. It’s just a personal decision… If you’re doing it because you want to hang out with other straight edge people that sucks, don’t do that.”
Ultimately it all comes down to what it always does. Cosmo hits us with some recommended follow-up literature – namely The Road by one of his most beloved influences in Cormac McCarthy, and Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario – before offering some concluding thoughts on the future of a band that have already come a long way from their humble-minded beginnings. “50% of hardcore is the record and putting the record together, that’s the worst part. 50% of the music is playing it live, so we did the one part now we’re gonna do the second part. Obviously we can’t go everywhere, we’re a little limited with careers and family and stuff, but for the next couple years I want to play the shit out of these songs. I just want to play them everywhere that we can, so, if you can, come see CONTENTION.”
Artillery From Heaven is out now via DAZE.
Follow CONTENTION on Instagram.