Full Of Hell: The Grind Continues
FULL OF HELL are, arguably, the most exciting grind band in the world with their relentless experimentation and working with bands outside the typical grindcore spectrum like NOTHING, HEALTH and PRIMITIVE MAN. They’re also hugely prolific, having released collaborative albums with two of the aforementioned bands in 2023 alone. Now, though, they’re releasing their sixth full-length, the follow-up to 2021’s excellent Garden Of Burning Apparitions in the form of Coagulated Bliss, and they’ve never sounded quite so vital with bursts of jazz, noise and more amidst the spleen-venting assault. And, as bassist/saxophonist Sam DiGristine explains, also their most intensely personal album yet.
The first thing we want to know is – how on earth does FULL OF HELL remain so creative? “We’re constantly on the road,” Sam smiles. “Spencer [Hazard, guitars/noise] writes a lot of the riffs and everything; especially now we have another member to do overseas shows, he has more time to write!” It doesn’t always come down to one member writing while others tour, though; the PRIMITIVE MAN collaborative release was mostly built in-studio, although “we had some ideas going in,” it was predominantly built there and then in Chicago. The other, with NOTHING, was built initially as a one-off for Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands that then continued to morph in-studio.
One listen to NOTHING, and it’s very apparent that they’ve little in common with the shoegazers. But, the bands have existed in each others’ orbit for years, and DiGristine says they learned a lot for Coagulated Bliss by working with them. “It gave us more confidence in trying out weird things, branching out and taking those leaps. It opens us up to doing even more stuff on our own.” The result is every bit as extreme as we’ve come to expect from FULL OF HELL, as the band continue to push their own sonic boundaries and embrace other elements.
“We were doing more death metal stuff, and trying to get more extreme with more hardcore and grind,” Sam explain of the writing process for Coagulated Bliss. “But we also all really like MELVINS, and Spencer is big into noise rock,” so those elements found themselves a home too. It meant asking themselves some questions that, on the surface, seemed relatively simple, but had profound impacts on the album. One of those was “what if MELVINS were a bit faster,” or “what if we added blast beats to MELVINS songs?”
As fans will know, FULL OF HELL are road dogs and their enthusiasm for touring constantly is perhaps what’s shaped Coagulated Bliss the most outside of its lyrics. “We’re like that game, Katamari,” Sam grins, “we’re constantly adding and absorbing things from other bands and the experiences we have touring all the time.” The likes of Fractured Bonds To Mecca exemplifies this; they wrote it, as he explains, in the same way they approached the NOTHING collaboration, but instead of any external influence, it was just them, writing together, programming drums and shaping the song.
Another key feature of the album is a relative lack of features; not simply because they’re working on one of their own standalone releases for the first time in years, but because the themes are so personal and integral to FULL OF HELL’s identity that it simply made sense to keep that side of things far smaller. Even the mind-bending artwork is tied into this, with drummer Dave Bland’s grandfather sculpting part of it. Where the band before have often been metaphorical, fantastical even in the delivery, Coagulated Bliss has one focus – home, and what it means to them.
That home is Ocean City, Maryland – a resort town, despite its name, with a population somewhere around 7000. In summer, that balloons to anywhere between 320- and 345,000 with holidaymakers flooding in from all over. “It’s a very fun place, for a few months,” Sam smiles wanly. “In the winter, there’s nothing to do. A lot of our friends have gone through rough patches – we’ve lost people to fentanyl, especially nowadays. People are dropping like flies.” It’s an album about small town upbringings, the mundane horror of such tiny places, but it’s also an homage to the place that forged them.
“It’s therapeutic to get it out,” Sam reveals, “but it’s also good to show where we come from. We’re a weird enigma; there’s a bunch of beach and reggae bands, but no hardcore scene. So it’s cool to showcase that we’re from here and that it’s not what people would imagine a beach town to be.” In spite of that darkness, the coagulation of the title, there’s also the bliss; a dichotomy at the heart of both the band and album, but one they’re keen to display. “We’re showcasing the beauty of these small, weird places and the struggle, because it moulds you, makes you stronger.”
If there’s anything to take from Coagulated Bliss’ frantic, 20-minute exploration of small town life, addiction and struggle, it’s that FULL OF HELL’s fire has never burned brighter. “We’ve put our entire selves into this, since the beginning and that’s not gonna change any time soon,” Sam states plainly of what drives them now. “Even now, when we’re busier in our lives, we just want to play. We’ll still play house shows, we book shows in little skate shops. We do restaurant shows in our hometown. Nothing’s gonna change – we’re just gonna keep going.”
Coagulated Bliss is out now via Closed Casket Activities.
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