Full Album Stream: Pyrrhon’s ‘What Passes for Survival’

New York noiseniks Pyrrhon love to turn death metal upside down, throwing in elements of noise rock and clanging chaos to create one of the more refreshing sounds in the extreme metal underbelly today. Their new album, What Passes for Survival, comes out on Willowtip Records this Friday, August 11, and we’re happy to give you a full stream of it today.

“Pyrrhon usually takes a pretty aspirational approach to songwriting,” says vocalist Doug Moore. “On all of our past recordings, we consciously tried out ideas we hadn’t worked with before and pushed toward the boundaries of what we’re capable of. The writing process for the new album felt much more visceral, by comparison. It’s more physically wrenching to perform than anything we’ve done before, but we didn’t have to think and struggle our way through the vocabulary of sounds we use the way we’ve had to in the past. Instead we just poured our guts in there, and focused on writing songs that got really strong emotional responses out of us as we worked on them. That’s not to say there aren’t some fresh zigs and zags in there—we went some strange places we’ve never been before in the process. But all told, this one feels like our most intuitive and primal work so far to me. Ironically, that also means our sense of humor has a more pronounced presence on the album than it’s had in the past.”

For more on what makes Pyrrhon tick, check out their guest-curated playlist on our Apple Music page, which will go up this Thursday, August 10.

And now, brace yourself: