ALBUM REVIEW: SHAME – meth.

Shame is a feeling that can be immensely hard to shake; that clinging, gnawing reminder of opportunities missed, mistakes made that can’t be reversed, your darkest secrets that might never see the light of day. It burrows, lingers, weighs heavy on mind and body alike, and thus proves a very apt title for the new album from Chicago noise merchants METH..

Describing themselves quite simply as ‘an experimental heavy band’, METH. have quickly developed a sound that feels largely without any obvious peer. The building blocks are recognisable enough; elements of noise, sludge, industrial, grindcore, screamo and black metal are all somewhere in the mix – as indeed they were on the band’s 2019 debut full-length Mother Of Red Light – but crucially they are all stirred into a single noxious brew, the band ensuring that no one style dominates while also impressively avoiding any heavy-handed genre-hopping from one track to the next that would ultimately detract from SHAME as a complete and well-rounded whole.

Further cohesion comes from the fact that the band have intentionally avoided a reliance on riffs for this record; the guitars and bass drone and smother and suffocate, thick and sludgy and made all the more obtuse by the jagged dissonance which worms its way to the surface. In turn, it falls to drummer Andrew Smith to serve as the record’s engine and anchor, his work often immensely hypnotic as is the case in fourth track Give In for example where an almost circular beat winds round and round only for its trance-like effect to be broken by multiple eruptions of maddening cacophony.

Indeed, one of the most impressive things about SHAME is that for a record as difficult and oppressive as it is, and with as many influences in the mix as mentioned, it is actually surprisingly easy to get sucked into this. With such a heavy focus on rhythm one is quickly lost to the steady throb of opener Doubt or the propulsive toms of the title track or even the haunting rise and fall of the guitars in Blush, for example, but at no point does this come at the expense of the band’s ability to snap the listener back to full attention with a jarring change of pace or a sudden increase in chaotic intensity as is expertly demonstrated in the genuinely harrowing opening minute or so of second track Compulsion. 

Of course, all of this makes for a good match to the themes explored by vocalist Seb Alvarez, who touches not only on shame but all manner of struggle and trauma and darkness drawn from his own experiences of bi-polar disorder and addiction. The lyrics themselves are invariably hard to decipher through the twisted screams that Alvarez employs across nearly all of the record – and even with the words right in front of you lines like “Drain love from my insides / Glue my skin to your throat” feel far more like they are meant to be sat with rather than immediately interpreted – but the dread and despair are clear enough in his delivery alone, and hammered home by the relentless punishing grind of the music itself.

And after all, isn’t that kind of the point? Shame is far more often simply experienced and succumbed to than it is picked apart or neatly put into words and the same feels true of this album of the same name. For the best part of three quarters of an hour this record envelops and enraptures and surrounds you and even after it’s done it leaves a mark, an impression, a gnawing feeling like the one mentioned at the beginning, that is not quickly forgotten. So if that sounds like your bag get involved, but also, seek help. 

Rating: 8/10

SHAME is set for release on February 2nd via Prosthetic Records.

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