Is there a more fitting soundtrack to the last century than an industrial doomscape? That is a wild claim, but crushing low-ends, shrieks and disparate noise match where the world’s found itself—a very literal industrial doomscape turned from Victorian wonder to sour end-of-life pondering.
And still our ‘sixth extinction’ is ongoing, where purveyors of gritty, cataclysmic noise rock can count themselves as its aural embodiments. It’s certainly true for Guiltless, a group peppered with doom and post-metal veterans who only just introduced themselves through 2024 EP Thorns. Back immediately with Teeth To Sky, the four-piece have plenty to say about the coming days of the Earth, turning their foreboding sludgy sound more skyward in appreciation for our existence. They don’t lean into the gothic, deathly drama of our doom so much as reflect on why disaster should be avoided. To paraphrase something Imperial Triumphant said, what’s more rebelliously metal than veering away from the blood and guts stuff?
They certainly have a point, and the overwhelmingness of Guiltless’ sound puts real power behind the album’s central arc described by vocalist Josh Graham as “taking advantage of your life while you have it”. There’s flashes of all the band’s influences to achieve this monolithic sound: Michael Gira’s provocation, the industriousness of Godflesh’s Streetcleaner, the rhythmic Dune-worm pulse of Meshuggah’s low end, all underpinned by Kurt Ballou’s mix that characteristically warms the ears with pounding guitar tones. From start to finish it’s laced with dirge and panic chords both rising and sinking in development; In Starless Reign for one employs riffs that ride like an elevator, and Billy Graves drums are thunderous. On opener Into Dust Becoming he punctuates snares in the verses to rival the churning brutal machinery of the stringed instruments, Graham yelling the less pessimistic sounding “Look skyward with no malice!”.
It doesn’t get much brighter, musically speaking, as is its modus operandi. There’s no thrills; even the ‘noise’ credited to three of the songwriters is subtle in its background builds. Lone Blue Vale is stark, crunching chords and plodding drums, granting space for us all to feel like the titular object floating in deepest darkness. The title track’s groove is hypnotic and echoey before a quickening pace arrives coolly and unexpectedly, and a smart little turnaround near the end of Our Serpent In Circle heralds a changed riff with synth-like leds. Snaky and sinister it is, through to the Norse world-building: “conceived you in the moonlight with horn and vengeance, our weakness.”
It’s through such imagery that Guiltless shows a drastically human side about feeling our own insignificance against nature. Closer Illumine segues from a glacial pace into rolling tempos of floods, while “the vipers are howling the wolves agaze / the kingdom is trembling at our last days”. Ragnarok feels like a foregone conclusion given that “we carved spears into bombs / all our hands aimed to god”, where alive or dead we sing into a space beyond us all. At least our ancestors felt ways to blame catastrophe, where we accept being a direct cause a millennium down the line. Teeth To Sky embraces that need for a collective responsibility in the time we have left, and like the unignorable gravitational pull of Guiltless’ music, if we heed to larger-than-life concerns, future generations of noise rockers will also have brighter days ahead to write home about.
For fans of: LLNN, Gojira, Russian Circles
‘Teeth To Sky’ by Guiltless is released on 7th March on Neurot Recordings.
Words by Elliot Burr
