Elaborations: I by Without

We will be the first generation to be born, to live, and to die, all in the time after the end of history. We will be the first to spend the entirety of our lives in neoliberal capitalism, a system that tells us that we have met the horizon. Within it, all that can come next is a repetition of the present that encompasses both our dreams and our lives as simple economic categories. This will be our truth, and it will never change.

This truth offers us limitless diversity in the form of sameness. It says that women can be liberated by submitting to labor the same as men, that queers can exist so long as they participate in the rituals of straight culture, and that colonized people can forget their legacies of structural violence and live in post-racial harmony. It says we can have anything we want. The problem is that anything we can want is never everything that we do want. If we want to live without capitalism, it is the same as wanting to live without breath or blood. All of our desires are generated by our experience, and our experience is stasis. If the purpose of creativity is to imagine an alternative way forward, then in our time all culture, all art, and all music that can be created are necessarily draped in the cloth of desperation and irony, and suspended in a timeless zero-hour that is the same as every other.

We are not making metal music for the sake of metal culture, replete in its calculated radical posturing, its conservative sub-sub-sub-genre segregation, its glamorization of mental illness, and its tired evil-against-good moralizing. We are not interested in the difference between black and blackened, vanilla and french-vanilla. Metal is simply the most effective tool available to us to entreat a desire for different conditions that we cannot yet name. We present ourselves as antagonists and reappropriators. We make music as a dismissal of the past, a pessimism in the present, and a skepticism of the future.

If the structures that enclose our lives are ever to fragment under the weight of their violent crises and contradictions, it will be important to have known the feeling that some new reality could take their place. There is no path to return to history in order to find it. Our music is an attempt to fantasize a future.