Maggot Heart – Hunger

Originally from Sweden and now residing in Berlin, Maggot Heart are a breath of wonderfully sour caustic air, a slide away from the sweet and sticky side of music, this is an industrial sounding crash in the darkness that needs to be listened to with an open heart.  Hunger is their third album and dare I say it, the game changer, I personally have only heard snippets of this band from my socials and loved the way they cannot be assigned to any genre or style, a blend of Killing Joke, Iggy and definitely some Patti Smith would be the nearest you could come to describing what this molten lava flow of music created by a synthesis of a band.

The album itself opens with the darkest sounding intro you could have imagined in your nightmares, the foreboding can be felt like hunger a ‘Scandinavian Hunger’, the backdrop is a cacophony of ridiculously intense bass that is engulfed in a primordial guitar led wall of sound that has drums that stab at any holes to fill them like a necessity.  This wall of sound carries through the heart of the album, yet it never becomes something that takes over or suffocates the artistic creativity that oozes from ever corner.  ‘Nil By Mouth’ is probably the most obviously melodic song on the album, yet this doesn’t in any way distract from the angst that resides within the vocal assault, the chorus though, does seem so damn familiar, or is this just a way of may brain saying “this is deja vu”, either way its a track that feels explosive and somehow it succeeds in just about capturing the power involved right there within its 4+ mins, a near perfect rock song!

Without doubt, what we have here is an album that will always keep you coming back for and finding more every single time you listen, ‘Archer’ is a song that has a lyric that actually escapes my full understanding, yet every listen it gives something other than my original thought, a sense of life reflection, a feeling of ageing maturity, even a fall from grace, but this is all encompassed within a musical deadpan of an overcoat.   Musically the sense is that this has all been written around the lyrics, like a story being told with accents of mystery and lightening strikes that hit just when they are needed, the addition of a brass section in parts is genius, there is no better place this can be felt than in the gritty hard edged ‘LBD’ the horns feel like a hunt chasing down its prey.

Have you ever walked  through a dark forest that gives you goose bumps, where the hairs on the back of your neck stand up?, this album will help you relive this in the relative safety of your room/headphones.

Released via Rapid Eye Records and Start Records on September 29th

Get the album from BANDCAMP or Svart Records Rapid Eye Records