Video Premiere: Filth is Eternal — “The Ritual”

We’ve all had something adjacent to a near-death experience this year — not a physical death for most of us, thankfully, but a profound, unexpected, lingering stare at the death of the lives we’d built, the rituals we’d established, the escapist pressure valves we’d found ways to into implant into our stressors.

For some, this process may have yielded positive evolutions and benefits. For those of us who more fully intertwined our lives with outré aural and visual culture/community, however, my guess is — and, yes, I’m likely projecting here — the cutoff was less edifying.

I’ve already written somewhat at length about why I think the new Filth is Eternal record is special. (A “brilliant and enlivening piece of extreme music that deftly bridges the gaps between Disfear-ish D-beat, old school dark thrash, mid-career Napalm Death punk grind, serrated sludge, and Sonic Youth-esque noise swagger,” I argued.) But one aspect of Love is a Lie, Filth is Eternal that I did not delve into was how alive the record is. How liberated. How when the music meets vocalist Lisa Mungo’s spark the resulting multihued combustion is incandescent and fiery and lets you know, unequivocally, you are not…dead…yet.

It’s a special record for a harrowing moment.

So check out guitarist Brian McClelland’s apropos comments to Decibel regarding the band’s new video for “The Ritual,” which we have the honor of premiering below. And then revel in life because who the fuck knows when it will be taken away from us again — personally and/or collectively.

“‘The Ritual’ is a stomping cut about canonizing our own destruction. Sometimes we do it ourselves, and sometimes others help us out. After watching tech companies flatten our Seattle neighborhoods, pushing people out for years, how can you not take it personally? The Ritual pits the internal and external forces against each other and ponders a final result, to find water flowing underground.”

“Shot by SATUR8R, the in-house AV crew from the fantastic but now defunct KAME House venue in Seattle, the video for ‘The Ritual’ captures a raucous tour kickoff show as Filth is Eternal hit the road in March 2020. This clip captures a defiant burst of energy, in an already turbulent city, shortly before the collapse.”