REVIEW ROUND-UP: Great American Ghost, Grief Ritual, Tayne

Great American Ghost

Tragedy Of The Commons

The pattern followed by recent Great American Ghost works doesn’t appear to be letting up. They’ll release something early in the year that seems like a real knockout, only for one of hardcore’s big boys to come further down the line and steal every atom of oxygen from them. There mightn’t be much immediately pencilled in for 2025, but with the state of hardcore, it’s not not gonna happen, is it? Unfortunately, that means that Great American Ghost tend to go undervalued in the wider conversation when they don’t deserve it. It’s not like they’re getting overshadowed so badly that they begin to falter or anything. They’re still rampaging forth, tenacious, unfazed, as as good as they’ve ever been.

Tragedy Of The Commons, then, is the epitome of a Great American Ghost album. Unsurprising given that they’ve never been a band big on a full-on makeover, but like everyone who can make bruising, bludgeoning hardcore work time and time again, they’re making the most of it. The increase in bigger, slightly cleaner choruses in a slight metalcore vein is maybe a ‘difference’, but not a detracting or depowering one. Regardless of how big they go with Forsaken and Writhe sounding especially massive, the bleakness and hostility of Great American Ghost’s worldview is firmly locked in. They’re doggedly committed to that, likely to calm some of the purists whose heads are only there for decoration, who’ll believe that a bit more melody is akin to a total sellout. Kerosene is the perfect opener to do so, boasting a sound that’s like a piece of metal being hammered and pummelled into nothingness. It’s revived later on for the slow, punishing crush of Genocide, and Reality//Relapse that, by its end, has grown into a seething, screaming nightmare-beast.

The quality of production on Tragedy Of The Commons—an ever-reliable Will Putney job—is what really makes it, though it’s not without its wobbles. Whenever the tempo on the drums gets kicked up on Lost In The Outline and Forsaken, there’s a frailty to it, uncharacteristic of the usual density and brawn. You can tell that Great American Ghost know it’s uncharacteristic, too, seeing how it’s rectified later on with Hymn Of Decay. Write them off as small oversights rather than ‘proper’ problems, then, especially when the rest of Tragedy Of The Commons deals in an airtight assault. It’s difficult to fault a song like Echoes Of War and the stop-start combustion it undergoes as it breaks apart under its own pressure. For-the-throat ragers like Ghost In Flesh and Chapel Paralysis similarly seem unafflicted by any genre-wide ennui. But it’s when the atmosphere comes in that Tragedy Of The Commons rises above the…well, commons—there’s almost a post-metal touch to parts of Lost In The Outline, while Writhe and God Is A Loaded Gun revel in how harsh and unfriendly their production is.

Add on the scraped-out vocals of Ethan Harrison to get another layer deep into the decimation, and Tragedy Of The Commons really hits the spot for metallic hardcore. Of course, that’s nothing new for Great American Ghost, but it’s never too late to have your eyes opened. If anything, it’s probably the best place to start, on what might be their best album for just how perfectly it encapsulates their vision. Destruction in a dead world is soundtracked by Great American Ghost, an unsung great of modern hardcore. Once again, that’s in the form of one of the standout genre releases of (this first part of) the year.

For fans of: The Ghost Inside, Mouth For War, Fit For An Autopsy

‘Tragedy Of The Commons’ by Great American Ghost is released on 31st January on Sharptone Records.

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Grief Ritual

Collapse

Let’s get this out of the way first, ‘cause it needs to be said—Grief Ritual’s whole ‘thing’ is nothing all that new. Flip over a rock in the park and you’ll probably find another hardcore band running off their own misanthropic ire. (Hell, just scroll a few pixels upwards and you’ll find one.) Grief Ritual, however, have picked up an approach closer to death metal, aligning them to the likes of Nails in this particular conversation. It’s not quite powerviolence, but with how able they are to step into the breach and trounce their UK hardcore contemporaries in the praxis of heaviness and intensity, it might as well be.

And like with the majority of death metal, Collapse’s artistic intent speaks for itself. Here, Grief Ritual are playing out their single trick, pulled off and iterated on exceptionally well. With a string of song titles that nearly all fall into the semantic field of ‘not-very-pleasant things’, that almost seems comically obvious. And yet, there are few, if any, missteps thanks to how naturally this all comes to them. It’s probably a more comfortable fit in that death metal camp rather than hardcore, given how that end tends to subsume much of the style. The slow creep that starts off Spiral is absolutely in that vein, as is the direction speared by deeper, heavier production that the double-time drums of Recursion takes.

All the while, Grief Ritual hit the ground running in terms of where they stand amongst it. Turns out that avaricious, unchecked capitalism and the world that formed under it are, in fact, bad things, and even if you can’t pick up individual lyrics from the mortar fire put to tape and claimed as vocals, the general mood and context should get you mostly there. There’s always the spoken sections of Consumed and Marrow if you fancy more legible bleakness, though at no point are Grief Ritual coy with their intentions. On an album called Collapse where the thesis statement is “the world is fucked; anger is necessary”, set to a backdrop of death metal-flavoured hardcore kept as uncompromising as possible on both fronts…need we go on?

Because, at the end of the day, it’s Grief Ritual themselves who are practically spelling out whether or not this album will appeal. It does, for the record, as a blunt, brutal collision course localised entirely to its own runtime. Collapse may have a lot to say but profundity isn’t extending its lifespan; there needs to be a bit more going on for this to truly feel long-lived. Still, for the time that they’re here and throwing out their myriad incendiaries, Grief Ritual’s efforts are essentially faultless.

For fans of: Nails, Heriot, END

‘Collapse’ by Grief Ritual is released on 31st January on Church Road Records.

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Tayne

Love

So this is what ‘industrial noise-pop’ sounds like, huh? Like most modern industrial music? No shade on Tayne for trying to goose their marketing profile, although there surely has to be some self-awareness in there. They’re by no means the only band to cook up a spurious genre tag for themselves—Christ, if only!—but it’s the fact that there’s so little to it that disappoints the most. Love is clearly craving the updraft of big plans and ideas, while lacking a significant way of catching it.

For a band who so evidently want to be HEALTH, that presents a problem straight away. Whereas HEALTH have a real hand for variety (even if only through their copious numbers of acquaintances to get them there), Tayne have little in comparison. The closest to a star turn they have is Rolo Tomassi’s James Spence guesting on Fear, with contributions that aren’t exactly leaping off the page. It says most about how locked in place Tayne’s execution is. Guitars and percussion are monstrous and pummelling to the very edge, to where they actively preclude more versatility that isn’t just a different flavour of synth buzz. You can basically reduce Love down to a series of thundering noise-blocks, sliding out of mind on their own glossy finish as easily as they lumber in.

The intent is, obviously, much more than that, given that mainman Matt Sutton discusses inspiration from his parents’ divorce revealed to be due to his father coming out as gay. Thus, there’s a present theme of humanity ready to deconstruct the typical musical vehicle for unrepentant nihilism that’s an inherently interesting angle. It certainly was when Nine Inch Nails made Hesitation Marks, as Trent Reznor, full-throated, bellowing “I survived everything” just sticks in such a special way. Tayne, on the other hand, seem significantly less ecstatic. With Sutton’s hushed croons lodged at the back of the mix, you’d be hard-pressed to pick up on greater feeling at all instead of confusing it with some ghostly new preset the band have found (see the basically incomprehensible workings of Nothing). There’s not even an especially more human feel to it; it just hovers and lingers, ready to get decimated by its own accompaniment.

Of course, there’s always the go-to excuse that Tayne are still a new band, testing the waters to figure out what they want. On that basis, there’s an impressive feel to Love in how uncompromising it’s willing to get so early on in its creators’ life. Peel back that single layer, however, and you’ll discover how little there is beneath that. If there’s a hope to be transgressive or warranting of its own stylistic signifier, it’s not shown all that well in this industrial-rock monolith (and even calling it that might sound unjustifiably important). Right now, the seed of an idea within Tayne hasn’t sprouted all that much. It might’ve just been planted literally this second, in fact.

For fans of: HEALTH, The Black Queen, Nine Inch Nails

‘Love’ by Tayne is released on 31st January on MNRK Heavy / Inside Job Records.

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Words by Luke Nuttall