Any hardcore or powerviolence band releasing an album in 2019 will have to compete for end-of-year accolades with Endorphins Lost and their new album Seclusions, a rousing 14-track ripper out next month via new label From the Head of Zeus. It’s not that the Seattle-based crew have deviated from the formula executed on 2016’s Choose Your Way LP or their 2018 split with Osk, they’ve just gotten better at executing it.
High-speed riffs and one-hundred-words-a-minute vocals crash into stomping breakdowns and the production is thick and heavy, giving the many fast sections a much-appreciated heft that Endorphins Lost’s previous releases lacked. Each song is pared down to its minimum fighting weight, which brings us to “Stone Man,” the second offering from Seclusions. Clocking in at a brisk 1:32, “Stone Man” is actually one of the longer songs found on the record.
Crammed between two thirty-second quickies, “Stone Man” covers a lot of ground, starting at 110mph and finding a hefty groove before spitting the listener out in a flurry of caustic, fast hardcore.
“This song is about perspective,” Endorphins Lost tell Decibel. “It’s about those people who don’t ask for sympathy, who have experienced so much pain and misery in their lives that they choose to carry that weight alone and somehow still greet the day with a positive outlook. It’s about that old women who as a young girl survived the Great Depression, or that old man who was drafted straight to combat in Vietnam as a teenager. It’s about those who are willing to take the pain of others upon themselves because they know they can handle it. People with a haunted past often wear a face of stone. And you would never know the horrors they’ve seen.”
Listen to “Stone Man” below. Seclusions is out on February 16.
