Harms Way & Full of Hell

Since 2006, Harms Way has evolved from whispered underground favorites to favorite sons with an arsenal of songs that helped shape heavy music’s trajectory, creating a roadmap for legions of copycats interested in “reinventing” themselves. But there is only one Harms Way, one that has never stayed complacent and constantly morphed shape– absorbing and reapplying influences in new and creative ways to create some of the most well-executed songs in heavy music. And yet considering the changeling that they and their previous efforts are, Common Suffering is easily the most musically diverse undertaking in their catalog, and their most impressive. To be clear– Common Suffering shifts the paradigm for heavy music and is a modern classic in wait.

While Posthuman mined the unflinching d-beat brutality of Deathreat, blistering thrash, groove and the icy nihilism of industrial bands like Godflesh and Demanufacture-era Fear Factory, the new LP integrates in elements of paranoia-driven ambient ala Lustmord, glacially-paced doom (early Melvins, Khanate) and even Meshuggah-like polyrhythms in it’s fully-automatic onslaught. The amalgam of all of these sounds in less capable hands could easily result in a chaotic or disjointed effort, but Harms Way pull it off with style and fury. Common Suffering is nothing less than a fully-armored and mechanized instrument of war ready to detonate listeners with their incredibly memorable riffs, breakdowns, and impeccable songwriting with subtle melody and point/counter-point.

Despite Harms Way’s reputation for unrelenting, chest-beating brutality, Common Suffering surprises at several turns with quieter moments of well thought out songwriting that emphasize light and shade. It’s their understanding of how to effectively orchestrate these dynamics that makes an already ironclad record feel infinitely more merciless. This is Harms Way at peak maturity– the ambitious sound of a band traversing new ideas and succeeding with their best and most fully-realized effort to date. “We really tried not to settle on parts,” recalls guitarist Nick Gauthier. “Sometimes a direction that we could have taken in a song felt too obvious… We would just troubleshoot that until we felt creatively satisfied with the direction we were taking.”

The key to the success may be a shift to recording at Studio 4 in Pennsylvania with producer Will Yip (Turnstile, Code Orange). Going into the recording, the goal was to improve some of the bands processes, examine vocal cadences and experiment during proproduction to gain the best idea from each track. The first change dealt with refocusing members on their specific wheelhouses. While vocalist James Pligge had previously assisted with riffs, on this effort his main objective was to ensure the best vocal attack, leaning into Will Yip for advice and letting the remainder of the band take the wheel with their respective parts. The result is each individual pushing to the far reaches and creating material that has previously never been colonized by any band, or hardcore writ large, before. “Prior to this record, I helped write every single riff that we ever wrote, basically,” details Pligge on their previous process “But since this new record, Nick and Casey wrote a lot of the riffs and brought them to Chris. After some back and forth, I wrote lyrics to the finished tracks.”

The title Common Suffering is a clear nod to the collective experiences of the past three years of chaos, misanthropy, paranoia, disorder, confusion and anxiety, with the band exploring themes ranging from personal struggles with mental health, relationships, political upheaval, corruption, and political power. Pligge, who Decibel called “maybe the best vocalist in hardcore right now,” digs deep into these subjects such as the track “Cyanide” which examines the expansion of media outlets, the correlative rise of disinformation, and the pervasive impact it has on people’s lives and systems of power. Additional tracks include “Devour” which examines the impact of toxic people in one’s life, the highly personal “Hollow Cry,” where Pligge explores his own humanity and relationships, and the somewhat improbable “Undertow,” which features the haunting vocals or Kristina Esfandiari–AKA King Woman–who adds a whole new dimension to the record and helps exhibit the band’s willingness to push into uncharted territory.

As masterful and impressive as the LP is, the precision-guided cluster bombs that make up Common Suffering are just ten more reasons for Harms Way fans to queue up to see one of the best and most vicious live shows on the planet. There, amongst the wide smiles, flailing arms, creepy-crawlies, and bodies pinballing off of the edges of the pit, is where the world will see just how singular and uncommon the new effort is.

Full of Hell burst forth with incredible force from the small, dagger-shaped city of Ocean City, Maryland, 15 years ago. Over five full-lengths, five collaborative full-lengths, and countless splits, EPs, singles, and noise compilations, they’ve evolved at extraordinary speed, their music becoming more complicated and technical without ever slowing down or losing its soul. Everything on a Full of Hell album feels like a blur: smears of guitar, harsh noise shaken like gravel in a bag, singer Dylan Walker’s snarl and bite carrying him into outer space or into the core of the earth. They’re coiled, interlocking, impossible to penetrate, and they move with alarming speed. 

They have now reached terminal velocity. Having created their own context, they’re now able to walk around within it, to survey its terrain, to visit far corners and see who’s nearby. Coagulated Bliss sounds like Full of Hell, but it’s nothing like any Full of Hell record that’s come before it. These songs are trimmer, less freighted with anxiety, more interested in opening up than speeding away. Its bile is sometimes funneled into traditional song structures. It never shies away from the extreme harsh noise, unrelenting spirit, and pitch-black sadness of previous Full of Hell records; if anything, the leanness of these songs makes them feel even heavier. Nevertheless, there are tracks here you might find yourself whistling hours after listening. It’s an extraordinary and unexpected evolution in sound for a band who made their name on rapid metamorphosis, and it’s the logical endpoint of everything Full of Hell has covered so far. “I wanted to try to take every aspect of what we’ve done from previous releases and integrate it into this one,” guitarist Spencer Hazard says. 

Coagulated Bliss was written and recorded shortly after the band completed When No Birds Sang, their collaborative album with Nothing. Working with the Philadelphia shoegazers gave Full of Hell new insight into the emotional and artistic power of classic pop songwriting, and to the importance of following a song where it wants to go. “That was a good experience of learning how to find what actually services a song,” Hazard says. “Even with Roots of Earth Are Consuming My Home, even when we’ve had an extreme grindcore influence, I still wanted it to be catchy.” Walker also cites the band’s work with The Body for helping him to “recognize that there was value in pop music.” Accordingly, Coagulated Bliss features some of Full of Hell’s strongest songwriting: Gone is the frenetic flailing of Garden of Burning Apparitions and Weeping Choir; in its stead is a richer, thicker sound, one that’s considerably less ornamented—and somehow heavier than ever.

These songs feel huge, totemic, groundshaking. In “Gelding of Men,” the entire band hammers away at one chord, stomping it into the ground at mid-tempo, blasts of horns helping to push.The numbskull stomp of “Doors to Mental Agony” sets up a circle pit, blasts it apart with a grindcore chorus, then slides away on a slanted riff. In the title track, they bounce back and forth on a thick groove, punctuated with occasional cowbells and scratched up by Walker’s scream, barrel into a pummeling chorus, then jump back out onto the dance floor. 

While the focus on songwriting already makes Coagulated Bliss the most grounded album in Full of Hell’s catalog, it’s also the first Full of Hell record that tries in earnest to reflect the world around it—not in some broad, monotony-of-evil way, but the everyday horrors of life in small town America. Three of the four members of the band were raised in Ocean City. Hazard and Bland still live there, while Walker is located in central Pennsylvania and bassist Samuel DiGristine relocated to Philadelphia. “The American dream is small towns,” Hazard says. “But anyone that’s grown up in a small town realizes it’s just as fucked up in a small town as it is in a big city—if not more, because it’s more condensed.” 

Walker’s lyrics have always framed their suffering with what he calls “fantastical, metaphorical shit,” but on Coagulated Bliss his writing is clear and direct. The album’s title is meant partly to reflect the idea of the over-pursuit of happiness leading to misery—whether in addiction, greed, or anything else. “Your happiness is just out of reach and you don’t know why,” he says. “Too much of this bliss, you think you’ve found your endpoint, but it’s really just this small, tiny, little thing that’s going to ruin your fucking life. And that could be anything.” Much of the album is rooted in the band’s own experiences. “A hundred dead ends, a thousand dead friends,” Walker screams on “Doors to Mental Agony.” “I hear their howling, I hear them weeping.” There are corpses slicked with morning dew, “false balms for deep wounds,” numb failures, thieves in the night and killers in the dark. There are many trackmarks; there are many dirty needles. 

The album’s viciousness and Walker’s clear reading of the world around him might scan as misanthropy—“humanity to blame,” he concludes after running through the ways the earth is “riddled with sores” in “Gasping Dust”—but it comes from a place of disappointment that’s driven by a deep love for people and life and the world. “There’s not a lot of anger, to be honest,” he says. “I’ve never felt anger when we’re playing, ever. It feels like electricity that’s built up in my body that has to get out. But I feel more profoundly sorrowful than I ever do anger.” 

The world may be in a constant state of bitter flux, but Full of Hell have never sounded more at home in it.“We’ve shed any kind of ‘do we belong in this space, what do people expect of us,’” Walker says. “The joy is in the pursuit.” The loosening of their grip on the direction of their music has made it feel paradoxically closer to the bone. “People tend to burrow themselves so deeply into things they love,” Walker says. “It’s too much of a good thing, and it almost cheapens it.” By paring back their sound, Full of Hell aren’t just finding a new way forward: They’re proving that a little bit less of a good thing can add up to so much more.

Coagulated Bliss was recorded at Developing Nations in Baltimore by Kevin Bernstein, mixed by Taylor Young at The Pit Recording Studio in Van Nuys California and mastered by Nick Townsend of Infrasonic Sound in Los Angeles California. Full of Hell is Spencer Hazard (guitar/electronics), David Bland (drums/vocals), Samuel DiGristine (bass/sax/vocals), and Dylan Walker (vocals/electronics/lyrics), with new guitarist Gabriel Solomon joining following the album’s completion. Coagulated Bliss is out April 26 via Closed Casket Activities.