Enforced: The Art Of War
Few bands worked harder than ENFORCED in 2022. Finally free to hit the road off the back of their vicious sophomore full-length – 2021’s Kill Grid – the Richmond-based crossover thrashers threw absolutely everything they had at it. Support slots for death metal legends like OBITUARY and AT THE GATES, a headlining run through Europe and the UK, a spot on the preposterously stacked Slave To The Grave tour with UNDEATH, 200 STAB WOUNDS and PHOBOPHILIC, and somehow in the midst of all that the band still found time to record their best record yet.
Their second release for Century Media Records, War Remains is the sound of ENFORCED going harder, faster and more furious than ever before. Crammed into a breathless 34 minutes – in part the result of drummer Alex Bishop’s request not to be constrained by the limits of a click track – the record captures the band at the top of their game, their skills honed to perfection by their relentless touring schedule, and crucially with their live intensity fully translated into recorded form. “I think that relaxed, kind of like ‘I don’t give a shit, I know we’re good’ attitude is pervasive,” agrees vocalist Knox Colby. “It’s rough, it’s unpolished. It’s pretty raw in terms of the mixing and mastering, and it’s perfect, it’s exactly how we sound. That’s how we all want to be portrayed.”
Recorded in barely a week somewhere between the aforementioned AT THE GATES and Slave To The Grave tours, War Remains is an urgent record in more ways than one. Thematically it finds Colby reflecting on cycles of life, death, war (obviously), and peace, all in the hope that it might inspire listeners to take stock of their place in an increasingly bleak world. “I want people to feel afraid – not from the music but from your outside world,” he offers. “And I want you to be more aware of your surroundings. The world is not an Easter basket, it’s not Cadbury eggs, it’s a scotch egg rolled in possum shit and you gotta eat it. You have to persevere. It’s about perseverance. It’s about survival. The whole album is about that.”
“It’s grim, but it’s more of an acceptance of this grim future,” he elaborates. “I understand that this is probably going to happen within my lifetime; [ninth track] Starve is a perfect example. I’m pretty much consigned to the fact that I’m probably going to die young, so I’m like ‘just do it then, just take me out’. I’m just waiting for you to pull the trigger, finish the job. So it can be depressing, but for a metal song I think it’s a really cool and unique way of spinning the topic to a different angle on a pretty depressing but kind of uniquely metal topic. It’s not that I want to die. And it’s not necessarily that someone is actively trying to kill me. It’s just this kind of malaise, this apathy, of people slowly not caring about people, and that’s the ramification of it.”
If you think that’s a scary glimpse into the inner workings of Colby’s mind, wait till you hear about his writing process. Likening his methods to that famous meme of Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Colby may be happy enough to leave the music to the rest of the band, but he fully immerses himself in his role when it comes to writing lyrics. His girlfriend once told him he approaches song-writing the way most others would tackle a research paper, and he is inclined to agree.
“I’ll find something that I find interesting,” he explains. “And then I will read as much as I can physically stand before I puke and get enough of a grasp to be able to write about it, and then try and write the lyrics and keep it open and keep it vague to where it can mean a whole bunch of different things for different people. And it’s kind of a general theme, like a concept rather than ‘I thought you were my friend but you stabbed me in the back’ – I would never write that song.”
Colby’s words here reveal something that’s clear about ENFORCED’s approach in general: full commitment. Part of it comes, he reckons, from the band’s roots in hardcore, and the DIY ethos that comes with that. “If we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it hard as fuck,” he suggests of the band’s attitude. “I wouldn’t say that’s machismo or anything like that, but it’s just this hardcore tenacity. I’ve been in bands since I was 13. I’ve been playing music and yelling at people longer than I haven’t, if that makes any sense, so like, what am I gonna do? I’m gonna get up there and fucking go for it. And I think everyone feels the same way because they have similar backgrounds.”
Of course, the same is true of many of ENFORCED’s contemporaries – all of their Slave To The Grave tourmates, for example – bands who started in hardcore before moving into metal often in the search of more technical challenges. Colby is keen to emphasise that it’s not a question of skill, though, it’s all about heart. “Transitioning that heart from hardcore to metal is going to make that band so much more superior to their contemporaries,” he suggests. “Because they have put themselves through the fucking grinder of working, living, playing, touring with no payoff for a long time.”
As for ENFORCED’s own journey, Colby half jokes that he’d like them to be SLAYER 2.0 one day, before concluding more measuredly, “I think we as people and as a band just kind of take everything in stride and let the cards fall as they may and don’t borrow worry from the future.” Those are words to live by indeed, although if War Remains is anything to go by, ENFORCED should have every reason to look forward with ever-growing confidence.
War Remains is out now via Century Media Records.
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