Written by Kep
Underneath – From the Gut of Gaia
> Metallic hardcore
> Pennsylvania, US
> Releasing January 19
> Syrup Moose Records
If you ask me, Pittsburgh crew Underneath are already one of the hottest young forces on the metallic hardcore scene. Their debut EP Nothing Here is Held Sacred, which came out in January of last year, completely blew me away (and ended up in my top ten EPs list on twitter), and the two-sided single they put out in June wasn’t anything to sneeze at either. Their visceral, ugly take on the style has already felt notably distinct in a flood of other acts in the space. Now releasing their first full-length via that sticky Alceinic record label up north, Underneath are ready to lay waste near and far as they stake their claim in the upper echelon of metallic hardcore bands.
From the Gut of Gaia is a surprising record in many ways, but strikes a superb balance between the familiar and the experimental. What’s not surprising: this thing is loaded with top-tier pummeling core grooves, monstrous breakdowns, vicious riffs both dissonant and chuggy, and incensed vocals. If you dig metallic hardcore, there’s no way you won’t love this album purely based on how well it does these things. Songs like “Stochastic Terror” land on infectious pit-wrecking power grooves and never let up, while tracks like “BOMBS” freely blend grindy blasting chaos with enormous slams and pinching angularity (plus a healthy dose of delicious pick scrapes). This is the sort of record that will have you windmilling and headbanging in your living room to your furniture’s detriment. Stank face moments fill the runtime from top to bottom. Fight riffs, breakdowns, d-beats, blast beats, slams; there’s just too much great catchy shit packed in to resist.
What sets Underneath up on the cutting edge of the style, though? The band is clearly unsatisfied with keeping to only one niche of influence, or simply writing a bunch of good tracks and tossing them together. It’s things like atmospheric interlude “-epoch-“ and its distorted spoken word, and the way it transitions directly into the terrifying blackened fury of “The Second Great Dying”. It’s the way they use strange quiet interludes to set up crushing breakdowns like in “Optimizing Bodies”, or how they step outside of hardcore to deliver a planet-sized slam and pig squeals in “Disguster”. There’s so much here: towering walls of sound give way into spacious dissonant chugs and dry blasting, moments of angular calm pass into classic punchy core rhythms and dizzying towers of thick guitar tone. Sure, that pervasive nasty dissonant edge isn’t new, even if the way it’s so organically utilized feels fresh, but surprises are also found in uneasily calm ambiance and moments to breathe, which are often hard to come by in hardcore, and the unsettling hints of noise that fray the edges. Underneath take an approach to crafting an album that seems particularly deliberate and expansive; their vision for this record is clear, and it’s so much more involved, interesting, and varied than the average.
And most notably, there’s the album-closing title track. It’s a sprawling, multi-segment piece that stretches nearly 15 minutes in length. Opening with a calm bed of sound and guitars imitating whale song, it uses ominous atmosphere to set up an extended bruising, merciless chug passage with harrowing screams. There’s an evocative wandering solo, passages of suffocating blackened walls of sound, atmospherics with spoken word, and a devastatingly melancholy finale that uses sludge to soak its rhythms in somberness. The record closes with an old recording of “Amazing Grace”, complete with crackling vinyl static, that gives way to quiet birdsong. It’s profoundly affecting.
All this in service of the album’s conceptual theme, and there’s no misconstruing what From the Gut of Gaia is about: climate change and the devastation of the natural world. The lyrics are visceral and hit like a sledgehammer to the chest, taking time to mourn the earth itself (“Big Blue”, “From the Gut of Gaia”), acknowledge coming ecological cataclysms (“I Will Drown the Earth”, “Galicia”), and to aim bristling spite at those responsible (“Stochastic Terror”, “Disguster”). You can’t help but be impressed by how vivid and impactful the words are, like these from “The Second Great Dying”: “Fields of flowers cast in stone / Seas of salt filled with blood / Take me to the edge of existence / And I’ll show you the power of resistance”. Delivering them is frontman Joey Phillips with a star-making turn. Your favorite hardcore vocalist wishes they could do all the shit that Phillips does on this record. A few notable guests add their talents as well, including a passage of particularly rowdy punk shit from Mel Kennelly of Princess on “Anton Syndrome”.
THE BOTTOM LINE
A few production bugaboos aside—a couple muddy passages, moments where a solo guitar line or a cappella voice is mixed too low and loses its punch, etc.—this album is flat out fantastic. It balances crushing groovy metallic hardcore perfectly with experimentation and expansive conceptual vision, delivering a listen that’s as thoughtful as it is infectiously heavy. From the Gut of Gaia is the coming out party for Underneath; if you haven’t taken notice of them yet, you will now.
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