As of eleven hours ago, I’m a blue belt in Brazilian jiujitsu. My first instinct is to rib myself over my second-lowest rank in a trendy martial art. I won’t. Self-seriousness is the mall ninja trademark, but this is the first time in my life I’ve put two years of effort into a qualified achievement. Yeah, I’m proud.

Jiujitsu is largely decentralized, meaning each school has different standards for a given belt. Not only that, but within a given belt grade, some will be better fighters. That’s where I have to focus on the art part of martial, because I haven’t managed to kill the braincop that wants those full marks I missed in high school chemistry. I’m not a blue belt because I aced my way through a test of forms that have become quite undemanding after 24 months of training, nor am I less of one because I can’t handily outgrapple every one of my juniors. I’m a blue belt because time and effort conspired me towards a vague yet comprehensive personal standard. Bruce Lee said martial arts are about “expressing yourself honestly”. In that sense, they are much like the fine arts. Even further: if there’s a formula for art, it’s intent to express plus sheer work. It’s my blue belt, and it took me two years to make, and it’s not the best belt I’ll ever make, it might not even be the best belt I make in two years, but it’s mine, it took two years, and I won’t disrespect it with comparison.

So why do I disrespect the rest of my art?

The acceptation of fine art as having no practical value is nuclearly damaging. If literature has no real use, it stands that the process behind it was of equal uselessness. There could have been no work involved. And if work didn’t happen, the piece must’ve been torn out of the glimmer-hearted author. Therein authenticity. A piece created with patience of labor can’t be said to exist, that’s not a thing artists do.

This is how the cult to the tortured artist is sustained. I’ve suffered through eight months of psychosis during which I produced twice as many paintings, a medium which I’d never approached before. The paintings were amazing. The process was unsustainable. It would have killed me if I hadn’t stopped it with every neuron capable of rationale. But this is the quickest path to stardom. Especially if it kills you, because what’s less work than being dead? Van Gogh with the ear off, Mayhem bootleg with Dead’s brains all over the cover.

I wasn’t training then. Neither when I published HELL, a necromancy on the worst of my misanthropy. It took a full year after my mental break to start jiujitsu. My grandmother died of cancer, my father soon after. That led to PURGATORIUM, which was mostly de-archival, and a lot of missing training to cry. By the time my other grandmother died, all I could manage was one article.

One of these days I’ll get the names that protagonize this story, I remember them being pretty famous actors, but anyway one of them’s American and the other one’s a Knight Bachelor, and the American shows up looking like shit, he’s a method actor. And they have a conversation like:

SIR: What’s wrong?

AMERICAN: I’m playing a starving man, so I haven’t eaten all day.

SIR: My dear, have you tried acting?

I don’t expect the American held to his regime for more than the shoot’s worth. Yet so many obscure artists are tangled up with this need for legitimacy that we keep it up for our entire career. We’re not just paid less to suffer more, though economy is a deciding factor in burnout. We’re also, on the level we do control, paying ourselves less to suffer more. We reject the little pleasure of pride, starving our heart as though it were not enough to be deprived in body.

The mechanics tested in my blue belt exam aren’t rote, I worked to make them rote. Hearing from a world champion that I demonstrated the best technique out of my little group of ex-white belts made me, in that bubble, uncomplicatedly happy. It didn’t relieve me of my pursuit for validation, but neither did I fight it, because I knew what I’d cultivated. If we can’t, as social animals, ex nihilo pride points as efficient as those handed to us by our audience, we at least have to believe our audience.

Technically skilled art isn’t better than amateur productions, only differently good. But a portion of that good must come from the technique, and that technique springs from the disconnect between your effort’s limits, and that of the other. If I’d spent this much time drawing instead of writing, I might be able to freehand the stunning characters my friends design on a dime. If I studied dance rather than grappling, I might have my wife’s 180 split. If you’re an artist, you, too, are surrounded by people that want you because you are, or will be, capable of things they aren’t. If you don’t have this community, finding it is the only way your creativity will survive.

Bear with the arrogance of comparing my craft to one that’s been honed for fifty years. Glennray Tutor’s photorealism eludes traditional meaning much more than the gestural abstraction often derided as senseless. Looking at Sprite, all I can tell is that it is the summation of decades of concerted effort. And if I can extend that awe towards other artists, and I have no choice, because high-caliber art introduces you to wonder as swift as a good throw does to the floor, I can turn it inwards as pride.

If you’re a marginalized artist, it’s a duty to the self to find such pride (lowercase p) in your work. Because the market wants your heart instead. See how many bestsellers are marketed to a tune like “a triumph of vulnerability”. Random House doesn’t want my work so much as it wants my Identity and the way that Identity has touched my Grief and Loss and other such pains. But I’ve spent time enough in the crash site. It’s not that we must close ourselves from expressing what it’s like to live in hostility, only that we cannot do so out of artless sincerity forever.

Fighting and writing are misunderstood to come from nature: I tend to hear from men that they’d win any fight, and from women, that they could never write. They’re both wrong, in that they both underestimate the simplicity of distance required to succeed at either. Having a strong chin is good; not getting punched* is better. To “express yourself honestly” without vivisection, that’s no essential gift, that’s the product of work. Common wisdom in Brazilian jiujitsu goes that most people quit at blue belt. After class, the visiting judge teased me not to fall prey to this curse. No sir, I said, I intend to do this all my life.

*Strikes are illegal in Brazilian jiujitsu.

The Question is asked when I hang out with a new group of girls. The Question drops one hour or three beers in, whichever comes first, less an icebreaker and more a sign of growing interest. I have taken that as a compliment before. Crude mistake.

What’s your sign?

Overexposure to The Question has been somewhat liberating. Adult autist self-doubt says socialization is a game whose rules everyone but you was born familiar with. In truth, some of the many rules of socialization are varyingly instinctive to different people. The popularity of astrology makes this clear: no one is born knowing that Gemini are duplicitous bitches who give great head.

So I memorized what my sign means. When I got bored of nodding along, I developed my own versions of the game: I started lying to people about my sign. This variant is most rewarding with friendly but occasional acquaintances who have forgotten your answer. With merciless confidence, someone that thought you Leo a month ago will build you a new person-suit in the shape of Aquarius, and decide yes, your skin has always looked like this. Both players in this variant relish sadism. If you’re lazy, variant two is to tell them to guess.

But The Question takes more than it gives. I’m an apostate Catholic, an abortive Buddhist. It’s taken years of introspection, plus panic attacks contemplating my inevitable erasure, to settle on disquiet atheism. I can play other social games without compromising myself, but never will I believe that I am me because I was born on the 37th of Phlogiston. For us enlightened queers, it would be unthinkable to lead strangers, even with casual asks, into squaring with your religion. But it’s fine with astrology, because astrology’s for girls.

Now try googling “woman disliking astrology”, even variants thereof. I managed to pluck out a Them article and a LesbianActually thread, and no more. I’m already on probation from Man Jail on account of my tiny tits and huge shoulders. Disliking astrology is how I’m thrown back in.

Gender’s, as any cultural dependence, the subject of religious interpretation. I knew this coming out in Mexico, 78% Catholic. Women are the Mary, Virgin or Magdalene. Women don’t like heavy metal. (Really, no one in the Americans is supposed to like heavy metal, but men get by.) I would always be outré. That was an adjustment, but no shocker. What continues to get me is the proliferation of the inverse dyamic: the giant slice of womanhood, even lesbianism, acting as defenders of holy prescriptivism.

So don’t make a fuss. Be cool, strategic. Yes, I should like to quietly watch my presence become a blind spot. This is why I signed up for womanhood. To become small. To decide which parts of the woman-suit I will sew shut today. If I’m silent, they might not even ask me The Question. A woman-suit is nothing but a person-suit with a ‘kick me’ sign. God, I thought Libras were supposed to be charming.

And that’s in the flesh, where people are writ large civic, if only as not to pick a fight. Online? Here:

Astrology advertising and merchandise, from mystical stationary to zodiac makeup palettes, are undeniably directed towards women and femmes, playing into gendered stereotypes. (…) As a result, many men don’t feel welcome in the community and react by guarding their masculinity and undermining astrology. “To most men, astrology is too girly or immature, which explains why they disagree with it or deny its validity,” [psychologist Barbara] Santini says. “This creates a negative perception of astrology and the women who like it. For some men, the refusal of astrology is linked to toxic masculinity, which does not allow them to enjoy the same things as women.”

Here is an industry dedicated to convincing women and femmes (I should just once like to hear that phrase defined in structurally consistent terms, please, I’m oozing discursive goodwill) that we all have the gift of scrying. All we need is colorful paper and eyeshadow, which is granted like manna by the divine Miranda. Pointing out birth charts are rather printed by Ontarians with something to sell makes you a toxic man. Or butch, I guess. (Butches that don’t like astrology: my DMs are open and my sexual accessibility is negotiable, as is apparently my gender expression.)

My religion is promiscuous, but not for enthusiasm in fucking around. It’s so because of endless discussion, with friends of all beliefs, on what it means to live, what one can do about it, what it is to be and how such a notion is even possible. It’s crucial for me to exercise rigorous philosophy, even accounting for the inexpressible mystical. Astrology has never said no. Girls of any denomation can and should believe, because the stars are there. The only thing it must refuse, such that it can fit into the spiritual aftermarket, is its own ontology. I have learned time and again that Taurus makes one stubborn, but what is Taurus? When Pedialyte is in laudanum, do their divine natures coexist or combine? If I can’t approach these answers, The Question is just a flaying. I may as well be on the therapist’s couch.

Women are more spiritual. I should just get it, shouldn’t have to think that much. The rapture I sometimes grasped when I was a more dedicated student of Buddhist meditation, which you could not pay me to thank the stars for? Must be stuffy man-logic, same reason I measure my life in numbers: testosterone levels, monthly hormone budgets. Capitalism has recaptured X-wave feminism and put up Girl Traits for sale, the best-selling of which is just not questioning how all of this works. Weird queries are the purview of the worst macho men, the podcasters and Youtube commenters to whom the other Big Gender sells. The point is to not be one of those. Oppositional sexism is the idea that male and female are mutually exclusive, cisnormativity is the idea that everyone experiences gender the same, and internalization is what every idea in this dumb lonely world will do to you, if you let it.

I think we’re dead meat.

-Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

You could bite off your finger right now.

This is a Holzerism you might find projected in block letters onto the University of Chicago. It’s also the premise of a horror movie or twelve, maybe a Cronenberg. It’s both of those things because it’s a bizarre yet inalienable fact of life. You could bite off your finger right now. You don’t plan to, so that fact can be safely ensconced in conceptual art, a roadside sculpture masquerading as an LED construction sign.

But someone else could bite off your finger. They’d have an easier time, too: for most people, even recidivist self-harmers, the physiological impulse to stop short of irreversible autonomous injury is more overriding than the impulse to empathy. And so they might bite off your finger. This is the thought that’s going to keep you a little scared of your bedroom door at night. Probably no one will bite off your finger. But only probably. The Other is not reducible to guarantee.

One day, something is going to bite off your finger. Worms, or a carrion crow. And it could happen whenever, no matter who thinks your time’s not right. For an example, wheelchair-bound Franklin Hardesty spends most of his screentime being reminded there are things he can’t do without the absent help of his acquaintances, like move around rural bramble, and things he can’t do at all, like take a casual creek dip. Even with his tantrums, he’s the least rude character in his movie. He’s a worrywart who can’t bear the thought of others being in danger, and he gets Texas Chain Saw Massacred.

It’s terrible! It’s dehumanizing. Franklin’s difficult relationship with his caretaking sister Sally is severed in the span of three seconds. Nothing in the fact of flesh cares about his humanity. This is horror: a reminder that the worst thing that could happen is dying. Right now, without warning, painfully. That’s all there is. We make personality quizzes about our greatest fear, with cute answers like “everyone hating me behind my back”, because The Big One is too harrowing to confront without fictional assistance. Even now I’m unable to convince you of the real possibility that you’ll slip to your death in the shower. I’m not abject enough.

Neither is The Menu, the most pontifical pass at horror in what goes of the decade. Now, horror has long been injured by its parallax with moralism. Psycho was about how wearing a dress turns men into serial killers, and somehow it got worse from there, as moralism turned against the victims. Jason Voorhees kills girls for having sex. The aughts gave us all those fucking Sawquels. And now that something like class consciousness has begun to burgeon in an America fleabitten with austerity and insulted with instant access to the gentry’s dumbassery, there’s a new target in town: the rich.

The Menu is a table spread of rich people. A wine list, or a table d’hôte, something like that. You salivate for its cast. Aren’t they so lip-smackingly scrumptious to hate? God, yes: there’s an influencer, and three nouveau-riche bros with credit for brains, and, most damning, a critic. (You should be so lucky.) They all show a tendentious, vain, indifferent or otherwise sociopathic attitude towards food. How dare you, sir. Some of us gave up lunch to torrent this movie. Off with their fingers!

We are sated with the suggestion that no one’s going to bite our fingers off if we prove we don’t deserve it. The protagonist, see, she stands up and orders one normal burger. For her bravery in solving Ralp Fiennes’ Food Puzzle, she is rewarded with life, while everyone else, on some level asking for it, dies. Reups of this scene have three shittillion shares on social media, because we want to be the girl. We want to be the triumphant survivors of an act of violence that destroys our enemies with zero splashback.

We want to protagonize the genre about having our finger bitten off. Something has gone terribly human.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is also about class, about food. Depending on how you interpret some of the better scenes in The Menu, it might even share themes of cannibalism. But you would not, under any circumstances, want to be in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The final girl survives by accident. Her companions are dead, and she is only better off because, in a climactic execution, the killer’s hammer slips his hands. The Heroine’s Journey works only if there’s a Heroine, which is a human concept. Horror works best as the dehumanizer: the reminder that we’re meat first and last.

Horror’s dehumanizing role is more needed than ever. Our belief in the skeleton key of psychology has turned everything else into a Boston Molasses Flood of pathos. From a New Yorker review of Succession: “there was something noble in the choice to put the characters out of their misery and bring their toxic cycle to an end.” It was noble! There was an answer, after all! Thank the DSM we are smarter than Shakespeare’s fabulist tragedies about the exact same thing. Now we know all those kings were backstabbing each other to their own detriment because they were toxic.

Back when the Moralintern was slapping parental advisories on Mortal Kombat, horror and its associates (violent action, explicit music) were a bastion. Fans were crossed as morons because they refused the lie that epic humanity is invulnerable to having fingers bitten off. Now they’ve wised us up, in parallax to moralism, to our detriment. Horror is about how it’s good that certain people are punished, because they were the wrong kind of human. This is smart because it’s more complex than the dehumanizing binary of human-meat. Smart is good because it makes you think, and thinking makes you post, and posting makes people stream The Menu, which makes them smart too.

But a humanized horror story isn’t smarter, just pre-masticated. Easier to swallow the cud of justice than someone else’s fingers. Bad things happen to people that either choose bad or fail to swerve out of the way of bad. They are rich (yay!) or traumatized (boohoo!). Accidents don’t take lives, poverty isn’t a driving factor, and serial killers don’t victimize capriciously. The dead from Zach Cregger’s Barbarian: a male serial rapist, a female serial rapist, a slumlord and one-time rapist, and an innocent. That’s a 3:1 ratio of characters who, narrativistically, have it coming, to those who don’t. The final girl, of course innocent, survives thanks to a hug from the female rapist, who’s that way because of her own history of abuse, and who goes out with a heroic sacrifice. Are you eating comfortably?

Childhood is a disease — a sickness that you grow out of.

-William Golding

It’s harder than usual to change out of your pajamas when your parents knock. Might be ’cause your face is full of Elmer’s and your chest is full of IcyHot. Your mother doesn’t believe you until you expectorate something with the consistency of porridge. You’re sick as a Santana solo, and it’s the best thing that’s happened all school year. You get to watch cartoons without fear of family commitments cutting in, the way they sometimes do your weekends. Snot and all, this is more comfortable than the chair-desk. Little wonder your family’s first reaction to sickness is incredulity.

Now you’re a parent: you catch your kid faking it, and, as an acquaintance of mine once did, call them in sick anyway. It’s clear they need rest. Either way, someone has to lie to get out of that cubicular, unergonomic lockup. The system isn’t going to budge.

Grandfather Nurgle is the Chaos God of sickness. Note that he is not God of the sick: that’d just be a circuituous path to God of medicine. The reasons to worship such a deity hardly demand essaying.

No, Nurgle is God of sickness. He resides at the heart of an estate of corpse-trees, blister-bushes, fleas and flies. Those that wander into his mansion become ingredients or subjects of the diseases brewing in his cauldron. Periodically, he will forcefeed a ladleful to the captive Isha, actual goddess of medicine, so as to assess its effects. His ultimate aim is to brew the infection that’ll rot all life in the galaxy.

Nurgle is the jolliest and least vindictive Chaos God, which makes sense when considering the nature of his blessings. Warsome Khorne endows champions with super-strength and imprisons fallen in war-machines; sexy Slaanesh graces with sensational ecstasy and damns with sensory overload; so on and forth. Meanwhile, all of Nurgle’s presents are sickly. Bellies distend, flesh constricts and sags, excreta exudes everywhere (there’s a free death metal song name). We, the sane, wonder why any would voluntarily take on Nurgle’s favors, when it would mean confinement to a hospital bed, away from polite society.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault describes the modern hospital as one of many loci where dominant epistemology is exerted on bodies. That is, hospitals don’t cater to patients. They don’t even cater to doctors. They cater to the governmental model of the Vitruvian white man that wakes with the sun for a breakfast of yoga and superfoods. Hospitals are facilities where we are remodeled into the idea of the perfect human, or shunned for failure to comply.

What’s worse, the hospital is omni-institutional. We always know when we’re eating, sleeping, exercising (or not), looking and acting a way the perfect human wouldn’t. In Mexico, food products are legally required to carry a seal warning of “excessive” calories, sodium, cholesterol et al. Basically anything that isn’t fresh produce carries at least one seal.

What’s even worse, the hospital is transcendental of institution. We replicate it ourselves, without being told to. Social media is rife with, some would say centered around, flashy attempts at becoming the perfect man, and even the world-class successes are policed into further perfection. It’s not enough to hit the peak once: real winners stay on top, for all their lives.

A social animal is wont to internalize that pressure of conformity, even if the perfect man is an impossible fiction. We’ve never seen him. We don’t know how many calories is too many, only that this product has them (for god’s sake, the calorie is the basic nutritional unit — saying a food has too many calories is like saying a house has too many bricks: well how big is the house??).

It wears, the struggle to near perfection. So much easier to seek out disease, to recreate yourself as sick, not by degrees but sick forever, untouchable by medicine, calisthenics and time.

In the embrace of the great Nurgle, I am no longer afraid, for with His pestilential favour I have become that which I once most feared.

-Kulvain Hestarius of the Death Guard

Despite the Great Grandpatriarch deal, many Nurgle worshipers would be women. History is rife with elaborate diagnoses medicalizing deviance from Perfect Womanhood: hysteria is derived from the Greek word for uterus, and symptoms included the failure to marry. The trick here is that, if the Perfect Man is a fiction, the Perfect Woman is a negation of that fiction, and thus inherently sick.

By being cankerously, oozingly sick, a woman can stop performing the self-regulatory health required to be a reproductive subject. In an empire that requires constant proliferation, a woman that isn’t pregnant is always unhealthy. A woman that can’t get pregnant is the furthest thing from the Perfect Woman, and thus free from the requirement, or even ability, to be possessed and objectified by the medical system — ironically, the same beast whose purported purpose is healing its subjects. For a woman that finds pregnancy grotesque and warping, her own choice of bloat and vomit is a choice for peace.

By extension of the default unhealthiness of a non-reproductive woman, transgender people are uniquely pressed into a niche of imperfection. (Yes, trans men can get pregnant, but the hospital doesn’t know that.) Of course, definitionally, not all trans people are women, but most of us have, at some point, touched on woman-adjacency. It’s been barely a decade since “gender identity disorder” was replaced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — not removed, replaced with “gender dysphoria”, because it’s still sick to have ever had any relationship with womanhood other than “not me”. No matter what we have transitioned from and to, we will never be healthy; we will always be asked by doctors whether any potential malaise isn’t a result of our hormonal treatment. Nurgle invites us to say sure, and, this one’s going to feel great: fuck yourself, doc.

Predictably, while womanhood and certain other forms of visible deviance from the western fiction of the perfect man (nonwhiteness, queerness, fatness) invite invasiveness and overtreatment, those who give the illusion of approaching the perfect man invite instead neglect and skepticism. For instance, as we grow up (the perfect man is capable of endless labor and sexual reproduction), the cherished common cold of youth stops getting us out of work, in fact forces us to work while sick. Those apparently healthy, under-medicalized Nurgle worshipers are the ones attracted to the kindly grandfather vibe. Hypervisible infection is license to be taken care of, with none of the urge that comes with householding and rent-paying: the urge to heal, quick. Can’t go once more unto the breach if you’d shit your guts all over it.

Take the Death Guard. The Guard were among the perfect man’s perfect man’s perfect men, supersoldiers hand-picked by the Emperor of Mankind to serve as examples of might and moral rectitude. Their specific deal among the twenty original Space Marine Legions was their physical fortitude, which turned into their downfall: blighted by a supernatural disease which their bodies refused to succumb to, they traded to Nurgle for release from the pain in exchange for servitude in unlife as bloated carriers of disease.

Of course, the Death Guard could’ve eventually found a cure. That’s rather the point of immortality: everything some day goes away. But what would their reward for that have been? At best up and at ’em with no convalescence, at worst isolation if not a court-martial for the crime of displaying less than absolute adherence to perfection. No, thank you: much better to be sick forever.

I’ve been blacksuppositoried and debased.

-Cruelty Squad

It’s been five years since we’d last gotten Bell Witch. It’s not like they disappeared; on the contrary, in 2020 they teamed up with Aerial Ruin for a full-length of funeral folk. But Bell Witch proper, the bass-drums duo responsible for vivifying funeral doom with 2017’s Mirror Reaper, didn’t even announce they were working on new music until three days before releasing their latest LP. How do you follow up eighty-three minutes and fifteen seconds’ worth of genre-redefinitional songwriting?

With a better eighty-three minute and fifteen second song, naturally. Yes, The Clandestine Gate, entry number one in the Future’s Shadow triptych, is better than Mirror Reaper. Deemphasizing the importance of riffs, Bell Witch open the way to music for emotion’s sake. The first growl arrives after near forty minutes of melodic movements just on the lofty side of staid — by the band’s own description, the vastness of a single death, the way a universe that surpasses us is nevertheless contained in individual consciousness.

The Clandestine Gate is better than Mirror Reaper, and it speaks nothing to me.

I enter Bell Witch’s timeline halfway between their second-to and latest LP, in the summer of 2019. I’m laying in bed, smoking an amount that would qualify me for rehab if we culturally considered marijuana addictive, looking for something like Dopethrone, a recommendation from a friend’s friend. Electric Wizard got it, but I was unfillable. I needed more it, whatever it was. A few months would pass before I learned it was heaviness. (You can fight me on what the ‘heavy’ in ‘metal’ means, but I’ll win.) All I knew then was that Mirror Reaper was drummer Adrian Guerra’s elegy to himself: having passed before recording, his cut vocals from a previous album haunted the climactic “Words of the Dead” movement.

This touched in me a grief I should not have had. The last time someone I knew died, I was twelve years old, and it mostly meant an excuse to rent Halo ODST while my mother comforted distant aunts. Still, I blew out my car speakers blasting Mirror Reaper at neighborhood-bothering volumes. The amount of time I spent with headphones on gave me the beginnings of hearing loss. Once, my father walked into one of my ritual listening sessions, and stared in the doorway at the bodily contortions the intensity of the music made me express. God bless him, he is dead now.

At the peak of this obsession, I began transitioning. And, with the sui generis intensity of what would predictably turn out to be psychotic mania, I conceptualized transition as suicide. It was a slow killing that didn’t always have to do with becoming a girl: even in men’s medium, a Bell Witch longsleeve was the first piece of clothing I’d ever been happy to call mine. Here started dying Julias by other names, like the one that knew how to speak to her maternal grandparents.

I did not want family-Julia to die. I wanted to know my grandparents the way I’d always known them, but they’re both seventy-something homophobes. Attempts to reach out to my grandmother were met with snide, would-be covert attempts at regressing me, while my grandfather demonstrated an ostrich-like skill for denial. In retaliation for trying, that Julia was killed. That’s the tragedy that makes a good horror movie. Someone has plenty to get better for is killed.

I thought a lot about dying. I got really, really into death metal, horror cinema in rock form. I didn’t just metaphorize suicide, I hallucinated it. My body hanged by the neck from a rafter not present in my real room. Car on fire, me at the wheel, seatbelt still on. Only through Bell Witch’s tectonically paced repetition could I match the aftershocks of psychosis. All this time, I had been grieving myself. And it wasn’t just the death of the Julia I’d wanted to kill, but ones I didn’t know were alive: a Julia that liked her studies, a Julia with an enduring friend group, a Julia with a job. I wrote a lot, then. Awareness of the multiplicity of Julias, even in their passing, came with a pantheon of characters to make and remake. Within, they all were real.

Then my grandmother died of cancer.

Now death was outside me. Death was cancer recurrence, less time left than I’d like, COVID and a video call goodbye. Death was that she never apologized. It was stupid and it did not fit in eighty minutes of doom metal. Trying to branch out, I stumbled on Mount Erie’s A Crow Looked At Me. Of his wife’s death, the singer says: “It’s not for singing about, it’s not for making into art.” That’s right. I switched the music off.

I would have liked to catch a break then. Four months later, my father had brain cancer. Cold hope, radiation machines and the Tijuana autumn; warm death, shit, adult diapers. You know how this one ends. It was the 27th of December, a year and three days since my grandmother had died, and none of it’d had fuck all to do with jamming out.

I tried to jam anyway. Writing wasn’t working. In fact, I haven’t finished a piece of fiction since December of 2021. Hooray for backup plans: I’ve wanted to be a musician for a while. I have a good growl and I synthesize guitars for composing. I put together an elegy for my father. First to go were my attempts at mimicking the choke-snorting sound of his death throes. Then I decided not to release the thing altogether.

I’ve become insensate. When all of me gazed inward, I made art easily. I wrote characters, and I wrote stories, and I wrote them until the end. I try not to look rosily at the past. I was amateur, self-absorbed to boot. But oh my God: I wrote characters, and the characters had stories, and the stories happened until the end.

Now my imagination is damaged. My ability to fantasize has been overgrown by the callus I developed as to not follow my relatives into the six feet deep. I’m not afraid of lifting the stone, just preconceived. I know Julia has suffocated down there.

Ten minutes after listening to The Clandestine Gate, I got the news my paternal grandmother was dying. Today she has been dead for twenty-four hours.

I’ve hit the limit for grief. The calmed turbulence of accepting that my maternal grandmother would never get to be anything more than paggro at best; the gradual revelation that my father had been unkind in ways I never dreamt, and kind to others in ways he’d never be to me; the preponderant inevitability of my paternal grandmother’s age, who was already seventy-one when I was born. I average one death per year. I expect the rest to be plain remixes of the emotions that have beaten my cranium, first to a pulp, then, after regeneration, to a misshapen ovoid, easily bent now that it doesn’t have to accomodate a brain.

Even writing this, I’m more hurt by the loss of my ability to write than I am for my grandmother. God bless her, she is dead now, she is just dead. I went to funeral mass, like I did for my father. In-person church was still forbidden on the Christmas my maternal grandmother died of COVID. I wrote entire books on suicide, not knowing the psychotic-Julia responsible for them was already dying. She wanted to dedicate a book to death metal. God bless her too.

The Pitchfork review that showed me Mirror Reaper dares grasp at optimism in an album that closes with the word “writhe”. Bell Witch posit Future’s Shadow around eternal return, the philosophical concept of time as a closed causal loop, everything dead some day coming back. There’s a desire, looking at the raw and ugly, to dig for hope. Maybe it’s natural to want to counterbalance tragedy with growth. Well, here is what I have learned: life is the prelude to death, and death is boring. What is then isn’t. I envy the ability to turn this nonsense into art. Me, I want to be airdropped in the desert, and forget that I have lives left to die.

Abuela:

Your God was the God of Nazareth, and I won’t take that from you,

but if there is another life, I hope to know you better in it.

OH GOD I’M THREE DAYS LATE

Q: Who are you? A: I’m Julia.

Q: Why should I trust you? A: One, I listen to more metal than Satan. Two, no one is paying me to convince you Poppy is good.

Q: Why nine? A: That’s as many albums as I loved this year.

Q: In what order? A: Alphabetical.

JULIA’S TOP 9METAL ALBUMS OF 2022

Artificial Brain — Artificial Brain — Profound Lore Records

(Artificial Brain.)

Spinning “Artificial Brain” on Artificial Brain by Artificial Brain, one might expect a classic stomper in the vein of eponymity aficionados like Motorhead or Iron Maiden. That what follows is instead two minutes of blasting tech-death is only the first of many surprises. Shocker #2 is the ease with which Artificial Brain marries themes of robotic empire with surrealism, their machine hammering washed out in oniric production and at times the sort of blackened riffs reserved for the most arboreal of metal. If androids dream of anything, it’s of this album.

Devil Master — Ecstasies of Never Ending Night — Relapse Records

(Punkened heavy black metal.)

Black metal’s straightforwardness draws it tight to classic punk, another genre formed against the demands of overintricacy. With this connection in mind, Devil Master’s second album delivers ten songs of mid-pace gallop. Ecstasies of Never Ending Night manages what few “throwback” sounds can by excavating a true treasure — mythical hardcore band G.I.S.M. — to the delight of an unsuspecting audience. This ripper of an album closes with a dollop of gothic dance-synth, latest in the lineage of danse macabres that is rock music.

Esoctrilihum — Consecration of the Spiritüs Flesh — I, Voidhanger Records

(Black metal.)

Esoctrilihum’s sole member Asthâghul has earned his cred by releasing an endless slew (like, two-plus LPs a year endless) of outré black metal with bizarre instrumentation and themes outside the genre’s purview. Well, fuck that: Consecration of the Spiritüs Flesh is forty minutes of hammering violence. It’s to his credit that his weirdo production still flourishes, as sprinkles of piano in “Sydtg”, recurring stereo ghosts in closer “Aath”. Spiritüs Flesh is as shocking and unwelcoming as the best black metal, a rabid explosion from otherwise one of the most pensive musicians in metal.

Immolation — Acts of God — Nuclear Blast

(Anti-harmonic, anti-religious death metal.)

To epithetize a thirty years strong band as “fathers of dissonant death metal” feels reductive: Immolation’s eleventh (!!) studio album, Acts of God, contains some of the most meticulous melodies on the old side of the death metal school. Immolation’s discography is a testament to failure, one the years have honed into unerring success.

Sigh — Shiki — Peaceville Records

(Avant-black.)

Sigh’s corpus is a collection of all the world’s music ran through the blender of black metal. Shiki sticks closest to their home, implementing traditional Japanese music in its composition and instrumentation. In this respect it mirrors its predecessor, Heir to Despair, though it carries a much heavier weight: the passing of the seasons, the closeness of death. Sigh transcend themselves with each delivery.

SpiritWorld — DEATHWESTERN — Century Media

(Spaghetti groove-thrash.)

One of many would-be bandmates once said that thrash reminded him of westerns, with its galloping kicks, gunshot snare and scream-in-the-wind vocals. SpiritWorld agrees. Whip-taut at thirty minutes, DEATHWESTERN takes to its theme with no fluff or gimmicks. Acoustic guitars quickdraw into the title track, a Cormac Mccarthy letter of self-loathing soaked in riffs like liquid courage. The rest of the album flows so cowboyishly despite its dearth of Morricone, it makes one wonder how there aren’t already hundreds of western metal albums: here’s two genres about greed, violence, and the intoxicating tragedy of power.

Undeath — It’s Time… To Rise from the Grave — Prosthetic Records

(Death metal, what else?)

I may be the only listener for whom Undeath’s romping music qualifies as “slow burn”: somewhere around my sixth listen of It’s Time…, I realized I’d memorized every chorus on the album. Having established themselves as death metal’s catchiest (un)living band, the quintet’s sophomore tests their hooks with everything from blasts and breakdowns to odd time signatures and bizarre production flourishes. The result, at exactly the same runtime as their debut, is the rare victory of a band that consciously succeeds in outdoing themselves. Trampled headstones!

Wormrot — Hiss — Earache Records

(Grindin’-fast genre-crushin’.)

Wormrot transcend their reputation. After two albums of the best grindcore in decades, and a swerve for shoegazing, they now break the genre they once remade. With founding vocalist Arif leaving the three-piece, Hiss certainly sounds like a swan song, bipolar with anger and a melancholia rarely seen at 300 BPM. Wormrot runs through death metal, black metal, hardcore, post-hardcore and symphonics, all without taking their foot off the pedal. What better way for the century’s decisive grindcore band to go out than by defining the sound of post-grindcore?

Wiegedood — There’s Always Blood at the End of the Road — Century Media

(Psycho-rage black metal.)

The instinctive acceptation of ‘psychedelic’ is a sort of purple-green stoner kaleidoscope. There’s Always Blood at the End of the Road offers instead a seeing-red psychosis, kicking three seconds into “FN SCAR 16” and never relenting. Having wrapped up a trilogy of devout black metal, Wiegedood now play in trigger-fingered staccato, their songs viciously cycling with the recoil. It is, like so much extreme music, a response to a worsening world: under enough pressure, even our saints will crack.

All I know is violence.

-Lingua Ignota, “I AM THE BEAST”.

Internet cinema crit, particularly in the scandal-farm social media sphere, predicates on drawing a firm distinction between the Film and the Movie. These ersatz categories are centered, largely, around the Film being better than the Movie, and quality in turn measured by how Auteur a Film is. While the factors that make a production more Auteur are nebulous at best, the ones that make it less Auteur are easily listed: if there’s an explosion, if there’s a fight scene, explosion in a fight scene, Michael Myers, quick cuts, shaky cam, sex joke, too much joke (sex or not), numbers in the title (exception: Truffaut), for kids, “genre”, wizard, I don’t like it, gun, Nicolas Cage.

The great issue with this system is that cinema conventions, along with their associated denominators of quality and Auteur, are a novel invention encapsulating a minimal amount of cinema history. What do we do with our North by Northwests, our Seven Samurais, our Fistfuls of Dollar and Enters the Dragon, the thrillers and historical pieces abundant with both artistic intent and the desire to give the audience a thrill? Do they only become Films if we decide the things they did “first” are more Auteur than their successors, or otherwise because we like them and the Janus Films Blu-Ray on the shelf feels like a gold medal in Smartest Filmwatching?

Here are my smaller quibbles with the extant Movie/Film system:

1. Plenty of introspective Auteur cinema is a soppy slop/sloppy sop of self-absorption and sentimentality.
2. Plenty of high-octane cinema has more to say than its foot-dragging counterpart: particularly when the message is “violence works”, quantity trumps quality.
3. A24 made up Auteurs to sell you Ari Aster.
4. What about Flicks?

To this end, I should like to propose a novel system for categorizing Movies, Films and Flicks, based around the central theme that has haunted and fueled cinema since its inception: violence.

First of all, we have…

FILMS

A Film thinks violence is bad. A proper Film will not pussyfoot around this conclusion: as will later be demonstrated, positing that actually violence is good under this or that circumstance would transmogrify the Film into Movie, or just make a bad Film. In a good Film, violence leaves only hollow victors and dead losers. The best Films hardly even portray violence as an act but rather a ghost, an insubstantial but awfully real plague, airborne, leaving ruins of men and buildings wherever it blows.

My personal proposal for the quintessential Film is Stalker (1979). A meditative two-and-half hour trek, the titular Stalker leads his charges through the wreck of pure philosophy, making constant but detail-free allusions to harm. Surrounded by soldiers, we see shadows, hear footsteps; deep in the surreal Zone, the Stalker checks for lethal traps, then, satisfied he hasn’t triggered any, simply moves on. The climax is one graceless fistfight and an abandoned bomb. How awful it is that people value anything above each other’s safety, and that we are willing to sacrifice each other for petty want: what matters is not the gruesome shape of the sacrifice, but that there was an intent at all. All consequence, no need for action.

Films have always been in rare supply in the world’s biggest production houses, and are even more so in a monopolized landscape (which, unfortunately, does not mean we are getting good Movies either). “Drama”, “period drama”, a good chunk of romance, the rare oldie thriller, select comedy, and, arguably, most horror, is Film. A great deal of Films were produced in Europe between the 1950s and the 1990s. High quality Films are curated by highly regarded bodies such as the Criterion Collection and America’s National Film Registry. Newer Films often win Best International Picture but rarely Best Picture.

MOVIES

Movies think violence is good. The Movie does not run the risk of being transformed into its counterpart, the Film, if it tries to remind us that violence is bad: a single scene where a good guy defeats a bad guy sets the tenor of the entire narrative, and to contradict that only creates a bad Movie. In a good Movie, judiciously (or not!?) applied violence leaves the hero satisfied, no matter how hurt they were in the process, perhaps because they were so hurt in the process. The villain, well — had it coming.

My personal proposal for the quintessential Movie is Kill Bill (The Whole Bloody Affair). Frankly, I chose this one because it trips people up with the belief that, being really good, this Movie transcended its roots to become Film. Recognizing the wrongness of that impulse is what lead me to write this whole thing in the first place. This absolute Movie opens with a swift dispatching of the only character in its runtime who, however briefly, believes she can get away with mercy. Everyone else who meets the vengeant Bride understands that the only solution is violence, and they either solve or get solved. Having lost everything and with nothing material to gain, the Bride seeks only satisfaction: her actions are morally neutral at best, repugnant at worst, but god damn they feel good and that high is what every Movie chases. Kill Bill tells you what it’s gonna do in the title, and then does it. All action, ‘cuz we want the consequences.

Movies are the backbone of the cinema industry. However, the time-of-writing monopoly insists on pumping out bad ones, the worst of which (and take your pick!) have the audacity to want to be Films. Action, most thriller and mystery, a few comedies, and, arguably, most horror, is Movie. Movies were in spectacular abundance between the 1960s and the 2010s, and are still the main output of the big two industries, America and India. Movies are also the main product of smaller national industries, with currently plenty coming out of Southeast Asia. High quality Movies are curated by blogs called like “That Guy With The Chainsaw” or “24 Badass”. Movies win, like, Best Visual Effects.

FLICKS

A Flick doesn’t know and/or care about violence. This isn’t to say that Flicks don’t portray violence; it borders on impossible to imagine a narrative worth of ninety minutes of standard storytelling, set in any world that resembles ours, to not portray violence at some point. Rather, the Flick downplays the acts of violence there in, mocks them, or might even be ignorant of the fact that it is violence. Flicks thus exist on the outer edges of the Film/Movie matrix, and it’s near impossible for a Flick to blunder into being one of the other two.

My personal proposal for the quintessential Flick is Clerks (1994). The clerks are, of course, subject to class violence. The very fact that these characters are working grocery store counters, VHS rentals and petty drug deals indicates that their lifestyle borders on poverty, with little opportunity to get better. However, though getting called into work on your day off is the framing device backing the entirety of Clerks, class violence is not the obstacle, and that despite our protagonist’s constant objections that he’s “not supposed to be here today”: after all, they spend the whole Flick blowing off work to hang out with the weed man. Instead, our clerks make up their own trouble, most of which exists in their own heads, a mode of living that’s inherently disconnected from the violence guiding their lives. Sex with a corpse is a joke, and so is the resulting trauma. Comedy is the subversion of expectations: action and consequence are basically unrelated.

Flicks make up a steady portion of the marquee, though they tend to come and go with little fanfare. As you might’ve guessed, the majority of comedy is Flick; so is a sizeable portion of romance, a few “drama”, and even the Flick-as-genre. Flicks were at their peak around the 2000s, when everyone was going to the cinema but before evey production became a thing marketing demand you have an Opinion on. (Shortly after, everyone would stop going to the cinema). Still, America is possibly the single largest producer of Flicks. High quality Flicks are curated on the underspoken parts of DVD shelves worldwide.

Postscript: This system, too, has its problems. Francois Truffaut famously (and possibly misattibutedly) said that “there are no anti-war movies”, on account of a perceived impossibility to frame combat via cinematic language without deciding on a hero and a villain. Horror, too, is for people that think violence is quite bad, but also pretty cool. I welcome any notes that could polish this system.

A QUICK FAQ BEFORE THE ETERNAL WORM DEVOURS MEXICALI

Q: Who are you? A: I’m Julia.

Q: Why should I trust you? A: One, I listen to more metal than Satan. Two, no one is paying me to convince you Poppy is good.

Q: Why twenty? A: That’s as many albums as I loved this year.

Q: In what order? A: Alphabetical.

JULIA’S TOP 20 METAL ALBUMS OF 2021

Aenigmatum — Deconsecrate — 20 Buck Spin

(Bassy, cinematic death.)

Aenigmatum is the latest band to offer 20 Buck Spin a now label-trademark slice of cinematic death metal. Doomed landscapes, proggy takeoffs, a bass as starry as it is portentous — for all its crescendoing beauty, Deconsecrate opens brutally and closes the same. Here is a masterstroke of complete storytelling.

Antichrist Siege Machine — Purifying Blade — Profound Lore Records

(Do I have to tell you this is war metal?)

War metal is the most delightfully mask-off heavy subgenre: nowhere else will you find a band called ‘Antichrist Siege Machine’. Purifying Blade, their latest and longest offering, is 29 minutes of pure Christophobia. Any band can take glamour shots holding assault rifles; what makes Antichrist Siege Machine a standout act is their ability to control their tank-tread relentlessness, to not bowl over the listener, but recruit us for their cause.

Archspire — Bleed the Future — Season of Mist

(The best tech-death around.)

Not only are Archspire the most technically proficient band in a genre populated exclusively by hardware sorcerers, they are also its best songwriters. Known for claiming inspirations as varied as Mozart and Tech N9ne, Bleed the Future demonstrates Archspire can do whatever the hell they want, by ever, ever so slightly paring back the technicality in favor of nose-breaking slams and chugs. The future is dead, and Archspire have claimed the crown off its corpse.

The Body — I’ve Seen All I Need To See — Thrill Jockey

(Blown out, sludgy noise.)

The Body have collaborated with everyone from the Assembly of Light Choir to The Haxan Cloak, modeled albums after Taylor Swift and The Weeknd. I’ve Seen All I Need To See, indeed, abandons innovation in favor of obsessively refined monomania. Sheer amplifier volume turns the guitar (presumably) into the sound of a landslide, crushing the shrieking vocals underneath. At top volume, it’s hard to even breathe through this album. The closest thing to safe haven amidst the rubble is a reading of Douglas Dunn’s The Kaleidoscope: ‘grief wrongs us so’. In trimming their sound to its core, The Body touch upon a sorrow so singular as to be universal.

Cannibal Corpse — Violence Unimagined — Metal Blade

(No introduction required.)

Cannibal Corpse is the rare best-selling act that refuses to languish on its laurels. To this effect, they’ve recruited longtime honorary sixth bandmember Erik Rutan as composer and lead guitarist. The interplay between Rutan’s insistent melody and Cannibal Corpse’s ever-rumbling low end makes Violence Unimagined a special entry in Cannibal Corpse’s canon. If Corpsegrinder’s delivery remains unchanged, it’s because there is nothing left for him to improve. Jovial, massive, and with an instantly recognizable rhythm, his name evokes the violent glee of a death metal Santa Claus, serving freshly rotten meat and potatoes for anthropophages worldwide.

Cerebral Rot — Excretion of Mortality — 20 Buck Spin

(Grossout death.)

Excretion of Mortality does in fact sound like it was recorded in Lucifer’s toilet, a churn of mucous vocals, acrid guitars and plosive, over-loud drums. This is the band so dedicated to out-stinking themselves they’ve gone and coined the neologism ‘disgustulent’ for the album’s closer. If death metal is an athletic effort to outdo your predecessors, then Cerebral Rot takes this year’s gold in Grotesquerie.

Drawn and Quartered — Congregation Pestilence — Krucyator Productions

(Old school death goodness, said the 25 year old.)

Drawn and Quartered is the kind of death metal that makes me say ‘they don’t make them like this anymore’ — whereupon I discover they’ve been playing for longer than I’ve been alive. Congregation Pestilence, their eighth (!!) full-length, is an unambiguous triumph as only mega-veterans can achieve. Here are no pretensions, no melodic allowances, no aspirations other than expert breakage of the listener’s neck. Turn it up and let death metal’s most enduring secret brutalize you.

Dungeon Serpent — World of Sorrows — Nameless Grave Records

(Majestically crumbling melodeath.)

A stock scene in gentleman-scholar action cinema: our hero’s tomb-raiding triggers an ancient trap, prompting the whole mausoleum to collapse around their ears. The escape scene that follows is so frantic, one hardly has the time to consider the immemorial architecture lost in a few minutes of shaky cam. In World of Sorrows, Dungeon Serpent captures both adrenaline and majesty, the instantaneous-yet-meditative of an ancient column crumbling into the sea. The title track alone covers a breadth of emotion one might think reserved for orchestral pieces, all while avoiding the temptations of symphonic arrangement, and without vocals, to boot. World of Sorrows is the sound of human history.

Enforced — Kill Grid — Century Media Records

(“Pure crossover death”.)

Enforced harkens to the punk-inflected birth days of thrashing death metal, when horror stories and protest were one and the same. Distrust anyone who comes out of “Beneath Me” and “Malignance” without acute headbanging aches. “Blood Ribbon”’s breakdown dances around an instant-pit-generator riff, flourishes emerging only to be reabsorbed by the primeval pull. Though modern metalheads won’t be surprised when the title track collapses into ambient noise, Kill Grid is much more than a page ripped from the contemporary crossover playbook. Enforced hails past and present in search of a future where thrash has won at last.

Eyehategod — A History of Nomadic Behavior — Century Media Records

(Stripped-down, bluesy sludge.)

Three years ago, Eyehaetegod’s legendary self-destruction cost frontman Mike IX Williams a liver. A History of Nomadic Behavior is his all-American hangover. Jimmy Bower, equally endurant original guitarist, leans on the bluesier side, leaving space for the newly precise vocals. Even the feedback is clearer, occasionally playing the role of a warped saxophone. Sludge metal’s pioneers close out their latest record by infusing Narcan lucidity on a refrain that hasn’t aged a second since their ’90s oeuvre: kill your boss, every day.

Gatecreeper — An Unexpected Reality — Closed Casket Activities

(Lightning-fast grind, then deathly slow doom.)

An Unexpected Reality: dropped within a day of its announcement, shifting away from Gatecreeper’s characteristic deathened hardcore, this surprise release is a response to a year-plus of soured expectations. Six minutes of blast beats pave the way for “Emptiness”, the mammoth dirge comprising the entirety of the B-side. Nearly doubling the front ‘half’ at eleven minutes, “Emptiness” is a death-doom masterclass. Vocalist Chase Mason, at his mightiest on this EP, has stated that Gatecreeper looks to return to ‘stadium death metal’ on upcoming material. One can only expect that this foray portends an injection of fresh blood for one of death metal’s fastest climbers.

Gold Spire — Gold Spire — N/A

(Death metal is jazz is death metal.)

There’s a saxophone on this album. Get back here, I’m not done talking. Death metal has found inspiration in jazz for decades, from progressive fusions to cruel atonality. Gold Spire aren’t the first or last band to draw the logical conclusion, but, with this eponymous debut, they’re already one of the best. Gold Spire is beautiful as a flower blooming on a corpse; when the sax rolls in, smooth and doomy all at once, it’s like the camera dollying out to reveal an endless vista of floral, reeking death. This is one for immersive solo listening.

Inoculation — Celestial Putridity — Maggot Stomp

(Primitech-death.)

Since its foundation, Maggot Stomp has earned cult status as premium purveyors of ‘caveman shit’ death metal. Inoculation pushes the label’s boundaries with a marriage of old school primitivity and new school technicality, single-guitar setup challenging both conventions at once. Celestial Putridity is a vivisection for a ‘cosmic death metal’ rote with psychedelia and Timeghoul worship, all pummeling, blast beats, and the admiration of a band whose members play with delighted awe for each other’s skill.

Oxygen Destroyer — Sinister Monstrosities Spawned By the Unfathomable Ignorance of Humankind — Redefining Darkness Records

(Atomic-breath-deathly black/thrash.)

Oxygen Destroyer’s mouthful of a sophomore album is, like the kaiju it pays tribute to, dedicated to wrecking every motherfucking thing around it. Except for the film samples, there’s not one second on this album where either the string section or the drums (or, most often, both) are not being played at smashing velocity. What a fitting album for our second year of global contagion: Sinister Monstrosities Spawned etc etc should not be played within six feet of another human being, for fear of mutually assured limb-ripping.

Portal — Avow — Profound Lore Records

(Sleep paralysis hallucination metal.)

Portal are a rapture: an ahuman mythos revealed to the band in chthonic fits, proselytized via experimental death metal. Like being trapped on the cover’s oubliette, opener “Catafalque” is so oppressive, so totalizing, that ten minutes become an eternity of night terrors. “Offune” is half the length and twice the nightmare, a mass of guitars like watching the insects under your skin grow. In every way the opposite of 2017’s electroshock ION, Avow and its noise companion Hagbulbia are another step into a spiral of madness that Portal has no choice but to explore.

Spectral Wound — A Diabolic Thirst — Profound Lore Records

(Classic, clear-production meloblack.)

“Imperial Saison Noire”, the opener to Spectral Wound’s second album, meets the ‘old-school’ challenge with glee: yes, you can still compose the bulk of a song around a single riff, provided it’s this good. Like their predecessors, the quintet plays fast, angry and fat-free; like their modern counterparts, their sound is pristine, a towering misery whose individual bricks remain recognizable. Even the album cover puts a hedonistic spin on classic monochrome. A Diabolic Thirst is not just another entry into Profound Lore Records’ storied black metal halls, but a must-listen unto itself.

Steel Bearing Hand — Slay In Hell — Carbonized Records

(Thrashing fantasy violence.)

I struggled for hours to find something pithy to say about Slay in Hell that couldn’t be delivered by its cover art. Steel Bearing Hand plays death/thrash like bards for an undead army, with their eyes on victory and their cloak brooches made of human bone. At times displaying the élan of power metal, Slay in Hell evokes the genreless ’80s, not for any one feature of its distinctly 21st century sound, but for its effortless fusion of everything that’s fun about metal.

Succumb — XXI — The Flenser

(Mystical disso-death.)

Gnosticism, Taoism, ancient Greece and modern pagans: XXI is a comprehensive portrait of human spirituality. Succumb reads from this scripture in mad prophetess vocals, stumbling from verse to verse over a cacophony of dissonant death metal. The band caresses dissolutions into total noise before veering hard for a classic breakdown, a pinch harmonic; like primordial representations of divinity, it would be comforting, were it not agonizing to behold. By the time closer “8 Trigrams” offers a pinch of humanity in the form of war drums, all that’s left to do is pay service to disso-death’s next masters.

Wode — Burn in Many Mirrors — 20 Buck Spin

(Blackened everything.)

After 50 years of metal, ‘genre-bending’ has become a genre unto itself. Wode smash into this new millennium sound at unpretentious breakneck. “Lunar Madness” opens Burn in Many Mirrors like a funeral racecar; “Sulphuric Glow” hurtles from melodic-black to Azagthoth paroxysms with the martial determinacy of Dvorak. The string section finally unleashes its prog sensibilities on “Streams of Rapture”, a three-part, nine-minute closer springboarding off synths reminiscent of the John Carpenter soundtracks that inspired extreme metal’s infancy. On their third LP, Wode consolidate the blackened-everything movement by positioning themselves as its spearhead.

200 Stab Wounds — Slave to the Scalpel — Maggot Stomp

(Death metal, no adjectives.)

The beauty of death metal: you needn’t reinvent the wheel, as proven by 200 Stab Wounds’ stone-age verve. Simplicity is their vehicle for naked creativity, from duosyllabic song names (what the sewer fuck is a “Skin Milk”?) to the slaughterhouse mix. And, despite their straightforwardness, it’s hard to box them into sub-subgenres and ‘For Fans Of’ descriptors, the way one might do to more cerebral bands. Are they slam? Sometimes. Old-school? Mostly. What they are is undemanding and headbanging, and still developing: the fact that Slave to the Scalpel will not be their best record should not be a turn-off, but an invitation to get in on the fun now.

Can you help me occupy my brain?

-Black Sabbath, “Paranoid”.

[This article discusses suicide and drug use, and contains images of self-harm scars.]

Sanitarium. Altars of Madness. Defeated Sanity. Heavy metal, a musical genre fascinated with the grotesque and sensational, has long integrated mental illness into its lyrical palette. Given metal’s infamous penchant for antagonizing the listener, this recurring theme may seem like a mere pass at shock horror. However, this very antagonism makes metal uniquely suited to portraying the lush and horrifying nightmarescapes of psychosis. By refusing to compromise with the listener, heavy metal taps into an incommunicable profundity of madness, its dissonance a paradoxical safe haven for minds that can no longer find themselves in the logical.

Heavy metal’s relationship with insanity harkens back to its origins. The eponymous lead single for Black Sabbath’s 1970 LP “Paranoid” stars a character scorned for his unstable demeanor and dearth of élan, forever seeking unattainable happiness. Legendarily composed in one night, this proto-punk ripper is a frantic pass at personifying a state of mind Black Sabbath’s members knew well, growing up in the bombed-out postwar shell of Birmingham, England: depression. On its fiftieth anniversary, “Paranoid” sounds as alive and distressed as it did upon release.

I’d cut my arms, stick pins in my fingers, that kind of thing. I used to get really depressed and it was the only thing that could bring me out from it. If Sabbath hadn’t made it, I’d have been long dead. I’d have killed myself.

-Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath guitarist, for Classic Rock magazine, May 2016.

At the start of the next decade, metal fused with punk, got fast, wild, angry. This novel subgenre, thrash metal, demanded frenzied lyrics to match its frenzied music. Giants like Metallica and Slayer placed their songs’ protagonists in the bowels of an asylum, or freed them in the streets as serial killers. Neither of these are generous or even accurate illustrations of mental illness, but they reflect their era’s preoccupation with the sensational failures of psychology and psychiatry. Even at its least sympathetic, thrash metal touched on two simultaneous fears: becoming either victim or perpetrator. Slayer songs like “Criminally Insane” are notorious for describing murder in the first person. Like horror movies, thrash metal was one of the few forms of art willing to tackle gruesome reality even as the body count piled up.

Horror films indeed proved the inspiration for metal’s next extremization. Downtuned and guttural, death metal is a hall of twisting nightmares, a Hieronymous Bosch, a single-minded dedication to the diversity of suffering. “Death growl” vocals are the sound of monsters with the taste of the listener’s blood in their mouth. On the surface, the lyrical fascination with guts (and the removal thereof) strikes as little more than ribald. Many bands evolve only stepwise, describing gore in ever more lurid patterns. But even this autopsy-room straightforwardness responds to a need to find art that represents the worst basal qualities of mankind; sometimes, that is all you have. Listening to metal has been linked to an increased risk of teenage suicide, but only until one accounts for other risk factors. In other words, metal’s fanbase is composed of those given to suffering. Listening to metal has also been linked to “positive experiences”, though this hardly warrants a study: consuming art that represents us makes us happy. Heavy metal attracts extremophiles.

At the time of my diagnosis, heavy metal attracted me.

I suffer from type 1 bipolar disorder, which means mania: months of insomnia, paranoia, explosive energy, and delusionally inflated ego. The particular episode that earned me a diagnosis was mixed affective with psychotic features. A mixed affective state enjoins the rush of mania to the cataclysmic weight of depression. Mixed states mean hours of racing thoughts, pacing around an empty house, convincing myself that I was fated to be the century’s greatest artist one minute, doomed to suicide the next. Logic immolated, my sky-high delusions crashed into a corona of pure fear: psychotic features, or hallucinations. At the height of my madness, I came to believe that I had forced God into divine suicide, and saw Him in a starless void consumed by what I can only describe as “a great black sun which is yellow.”

This is the sort of marriage of raw horror and high-concept blasphemy that metal bands like Incantation deliver in “Onward to Golgotha”, with visions of a Jesus Christ that has failed his messianic mission and now burns in hell. For the eight months that my psychotic episode lasted, metal was the only thing that made sense. This was not a new love: at the age of twelve, Metallica’s “One” had been a revelation, a chronicle of sour misery that soothed me even as it taught me to headbang. It would be years before I could put words to Metallica’s melange of feelings — years spent as a sad teenager, consumed by what my family and I thought was unipolar depression, listening to nothing but the Mountain Goats. It was psychosis that brought me back to heavy metal, and pushed me to explore the bounds of the screaming subgenres I’d ignored for so long.

During one of the earliest manifestations of my oncoming mania, I asked friend after friend to provide me with new music. I was so tired of the Mountain Goats. (I have since learned to love them again, and been delighted to learn of John Darnielle’s passion for death metal.) This is how I landed on Electric Wizard’s ‘stoner metal’ masterpiece “Dopethrone”. It had been years since I had been understood by music the way Electric Wizard understood me. “Dopethrone” was an endless bad trip, a psychoactive waking nightmare self-medicated with brick weed and black magic fantasies. “Dopethrone’’ understood what it’s like to hate everyone. Yes, everyone. In psychosis, there is no little hatred. Mine was an all-devouring desire to take the world in the palm of your hand and squeeze the blood out of it like an overripe tomato. World extermination.

Nuclear warheads, ready to strike

This world is so fucked, let’s end it tonight

-Electric Wizard, “Funeralopolis”.

Committing psychotic anger to paper feels theatrical, like a confession of crimes I never perpetrated. But, when backed by the appropriate music, this kind of writing crosses the threshold of ridiculous and becomes all too real. Soon after “Dopethrone” came my first death metal album, Ossuarium’s “Living Tomb”. It didn’t quite click on a first listen. But I came back to it over and over again, trying to decipher my malformed reflection in the panic-attack drumming, the vocals like a man drowning in magma. As far as introducing me to death metal, it helped that “Living Tomb” juxtaposed passages of ponderous clean melody against the full bore riffage. Ultimately, though, it was the latter that, and I mean this, saved me. Death metal was the cavern where I took refuge as my mind attempted to achieve liftoff. I relistened to “Living Tomb” with the bloodyminded obsession only mania can provide. It was not surprising to discover that songs with titles like “Vomiting Black Death” decried the futility of life and begged for suicide. It’s not that the pulp terror belies a meditative approach to suicidal ideation. Rather, they go hand in hand. Death metal’s gross physical suffering responds to agonies of the mind so vivid that they become a bodily phenomenon. Death metal spoke to the sensory consequences inflicted by my insanity, boiling in the long desert summer, clamped by a day-to-night tension headache extending all the way to my upper back, sleepless with visions of a God that I’d killed with the power of my mind.

Due to some mechanism of brain chemistry, mania must always be balanced out with an episode of depression. Here I would discover black metal, another extreme subgenre which I’d overlooked in my frenzy. If death metal is a horror movie, black metal is Romantic era horror literature, zeroing in on abject helplessness as felt from within. Strings keen high; singers shriek like they’re lost in a snowstorm. Though, like death metal, it’s played at a rapid pace, the final sound is a chill wind’s frostbite, indifferent, relentless. One of the genre’s luminaries, Mayhem vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin, suffered from Cotard’s delusion: he believed he was, as the stage name “Dead” implied, a walking corpse. Dead committed suicide at 22, one year younger than I was when I discovered his music. Seas apart, American solo black metallers would refine (if not necessarily invent) the sound of “depressive suicidal black metal”, which says it all on the tin. Having lived all my life on the Mexico/USA border, American black metal cuts bone-deep. Many of its artists were caught in my precise situation: mad, broke, drawing inspiration from the blank walls of their bedroom, unfooled by claims of communal unity in the face of total isolation.

Come and see how easy, expendable it is for human life to be forgotten

Haters of life are telepathic with the deceased

-Xasthur, “Telepathic With The Deceased”.

It’s no coincidence that black metal’s introspective nature would attract a musical intelligentsia preoccupied with pushing the genre to its absolute extreme. “Avant garde” artists like Krallice, for example, deal with pantheism by connecting the philosophical abstract with the manifestations of material contact with the divine. This sort of union of mental concept and physical consequence can be understood by any given person, but is granted immediate weight by the receptiveness of an altered state of mind. Japanese something-metal band Sigh cuts the middleman, painting the internal logic of a hallucination by adding a potpourri of musical influences (spaghetti western soundtracks, ballroom waltz, military marches, opera) to their metallic base.

Your conscious self is ill-equipped to comprehend the sounds produced on this recording.

-Sigh, “Hail Horror Hail”.

At many points in my adult life, I could’ve been said to have the tools to “understand” this wild kind of music. I grew up on progressive rock, spent months of my childhood at a spurious classical music therapy program meant to cure my neurodivergence. I harbor a longstanding passion for monumental, complex sounds, and believe that if I don’t “get” art, that’s a bridge for me to cross. At any given point in my early twenties, I could have made the effort to get into extreme metal by force of repeated exposure. But music doesn’t respond to conscious will.. Music taps into the prelinguistic mind, the inexplicable and nameless thoughts one can only contact when quite young or quite insane. Heavy metal doesn’t care to translate these burning sensations into something communicable. It is a celebration of contradiction, an assurance of worth for that which can never be brought to light. Heavy metal is the language of the mad.

-Seth Dickinson, “The Tyrant Baru Cormorant”

An exposed neck. A cocky grin, a severe glare. The tip of a blade against a throat. Controlled breaths, straying eyes, the fragility of power, the tacit exchange of control, threats delivered in a coquettish purr. Anchored in such images is the romance-drama trope of “Enemies to Lovers”, pernicious tales of romance whose deuteragonists stand at opposing ends of a conflict. A cursory search takes one to the Fanlore wiki, though the bones of the motif have a much more timeworn origin. Tales of “star-crossed” lovers are as old as the writing of love itself, or at least as old as Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe. These tales often offer their protagonists a dichotomy: forget love and acquiesce, or struggle to be free. By itself, this has more than enough appeal. But ETL romance understands that the fight for freedom is rarely so straightforward, especially when the combatants are so entrenched in the systems that bind them. Would-be lovers in this genre are armored behind ironclad codes of conduct that restrict intimacy to antagonism. The only way to become close to their paramour is to antagonize them, and the duel becomes entangled with the ritual of affection until they are indistinguishable. The best of these stories bring their characters, through mutual and repeated conflict, to confront the restrictions a loveless world has imposed on their heart — and to tear out the chains, with all the bloody mess that requires.

It’s a huge hit with lesbians.

Once, Enemies to Lovers had been relegated to a playful undercurrent of rivalry between titular boy/girl couples otherwise all doe-eyed for each other, or, worse, to Brangelina action-comedy outings. At some point over the last decade, the already flimsy walls between writers’ rooms and fanbases crumbled at last. With that came a vivification of the sort of sanguine, emotion-driven conflict that fans had been producing en masse for decades. And Enemies to Lovers grew from niche appeal fanfiction trope, to cornerstone of internet literature, to syndicated media. Perhaps the two most notorious examples are BBC America’s Killing Eve and Netflix original She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. The former centers on the lethal game of cat and mouse between an MI6 agent and a professional assassin. Killing Eve has not yet had anything resembling a traditional romance scene, but it is, from the very first episode, powered by mutual obsession, sharp and unsubtle like a love letter papercut. Agent Eve’s closet sapphic fascination with female murderers earns her a spot on the investigative team trailing international assassin Villanelle. As for Villanelle, the first thing she does to Eve is gawk at her hair. Season 2’s climax has the assassin holding a knife to her opponent’s throat, only to spare her — not before leaning in to smell her neck.

She-Ra’s ecstatic finale, on the other hand, brings the series to a close with the first-ever lesbian kiss on Y7 television. The kiss is five seasons in the making; to be sure, five seasons featuring an expansive cast of characters, an overarching sci-fi plot and more satisfying emotional arcs than you could shake a binge-watch at. But the engine powering the show is the rupture between child soldiers turned revolutionary leader/would-be conqueror Adora and Catra. She-Ra’s themes are all those of difficult love: violent trauma, the indoctrination and internalization of oppressive values, the burden of duty, and victory at last through an open heart. This instinctive understanding is what attracted lesbians of all ages to She-Ra even when it wasn’t a sure thing that Catra and Adora would end up together. Tussling in the dirt, claws out, with the girl you never dared fess up to, is an inherently lesbian activity.

The boundaries of what a woman is allowed to be and express are strictly controlled in the service of submission. The perfect woman is demure, patient, sweet, resilient in the face of adversity but not resilient enough to stand up and fight. Expectations double up for lesbians, by definition missing a key piece of the puzzle that is socially acceptable womanhood: availability for pleasuring men. We all have our ways of dealing with our social station, and just about none of them are flawless conformity. That would require women to not feel anger. And we do, of course we do, volcanic solar flares of rage in their simplest form. Expressing such raw fury, though, leads women to social and professional ruin much more often than men. So we also metamorphose anger into a unique, icy seething, a rapier underneath the cloak. It is an involuntarily acquired skill, resulting from the repeated motions of hiding irritation from catcallers, internet strangers, professional superiors, misgenderers, friends-of-friends, even family members. But it is a skill. You wield it and you make it yours and you never cave, even when you pretend you do.

One of the great joys of gay love is the ecstasy of closeness to someone who navigates the same gender as you. The lesbian appeal of Enemies to Lovers begins at self-identification. The anger we’ve so long kept concealed comes to be reflected at last in the women involved in these complicated, too-real relationships. You might feel a kinship with the explosive one or the conniving one. Maybe they’ll both be explosive, or they’ll both be conniving. The most textured characters might move from one end to the other, fury as lava seeping through the armor, ice-water shocks poured over raging fires. ETL romance’s female deuteragonists are necessarily multilayered, as the trope’s very core is cognitive dissonance. Here, you can see women acting on their resentments, succeeding or failing for it. You can see women who have fought tooth and nail for their positions of power, or women molded by the authority they were born into. There are yells and cold vengeances, barked orders and bedroom breakdowns. Reckless and imperious all at once, these and many more are the realities of feminine anger that Enemies to Lovers fiction allows us to explore. Like any emotion, it screams to be seen; like any skill, it begs to be challenged. Dueled. Ideally, by a pretty girl.

You wouldn’t duel an unarmed opponent. That is called predation. And the fear of being a predatory lesbian is a real, pervasive one, drilled into us by a media that insists women are mellow beasts of prey. Lesbianism places the onus on you to initiate relationships with other women, making you extra aware of your sharp edges. Enemies to Lovers romance obliterates this fear by forcing a situation that exposes your antagonistic facets to your object of affection — and hers, to you. Crucially, this is not the corrosive needling of a destructive relationship, where the interested parties have arrived at their lovers’ worst after being ensorcelled by their best. The dynamic here is the exact opposite. Our enemy is granted the rare privilege of seeing the totality of another girl’s guard, nimble or ponderous as it may be. All that’s left is to find what’s underneath. To pry your rapier into the fissures and find the lover prowling below.

When our worst side comes to light, we have to confront it. Just as the fear of being predatory, many of our most destructive behaviors are internalizations of social impositions. It’s because of this that authority is a long-running theme in Enemies to Lovers romance. Positions of authority are bargains with the devil: you can be strong if and only if you follow a strict set of rules. If you play the role long enough, the rules become ingrained, their own system of reward and punishment. It’s altogether not a hard bargain to rope lesbians into, in particular those of us who remain in unsafe situations and for whom quotidian life is something of a battlefield. Transgender women know this hypervigilance all too well. Certain strains of transphobia are predicated on the idea that transgender women are tainted due to our extended contact with the dominant side of the patriarchal equation. A categorical untruth, yet tragically easy to swallow. This is among the reasons why transgender women gravitate towards villainous characters. It feels good to be as bad as they say you are, and still win. Whether you carry that authority according to the strictures of your station or not, though, it eats at you. Therein lies the grace of defeat offered by ETL romance. When the would-be lovers fight as enemies, whoever loses has been unburdened of their invulnerability. They are fallible, human, and humans can fall in love.

The most expeditious way to arrive at this unburdening is through the most visceral scenes offered by Enemies to Lovers: fight scenes. For all but the truest of believers, physical control is the only form of power that can truncate social control. We are drawn to characters who wield weapons, and who wield them well, because they possess the power to quite literally cut to the heart of the matter. Fight scenes across all media are choreographed expressions of the fighters’ truth. They rely not only on the character’s skill with their chosen weapon, but on emotional beats: how important is the result of this fight, how do I feel about the person on the receiving end? Where other tropes abound in date scenes, Enemies to Lovers abounds in fight scenes. The loving couple cannot help but uncover feelings, both theirs and their opponent’s, with every thrust of the blade. The aftermath of the match can lead to some of the most dramatic revelations yet. Verbal barbs can be exchanged along with physical ones. And even all of those tools are optional. Raw, wordless expression lies in the face an opponent makes as their chin is tilted up with the point of a blade. The lesbian you are under duress, too, is worthy of being beheld and admired.