Filth Is Eternal’s Impossible World, due March 17 via MNRK Records, is a product of the present moment—restless, volatile, and unavoidably urgent. The album channels questions of humanity and resistance in a world increasingly shaped by technology and forces beyond consent, propelled by fiery lyrics and frenetic guitars. “It felt like the timing of it—every day feels crazier and crazier out there,” says vocalist Lis D’Angelo.
Guitarist Brian McClelland adds, “We like to be a high energy band coming from punk and hardcore and just making rock ‘n’ roll and grunge, the energy that we put out is reflective of what we feel like we’re experiencing. We try to maintain that in the music. It’s our outlet. This is therapy for us, so this is how we process a lot of that intense experience of reality.”
Formed in Seattle, Washington, the band has been inspired by the raw energy of punk rock music and built a reputation for themselves through energetic live shows in DIY venues across the country. Arriving in Seattle in the late 2000s, the band has seen the city change in real time through gentrification and new constriction, inspiring them to pen a track titled “Acetylene.” Inspired by pre-dawn walks through Seattle’s streets “where new construction rises seemingly indifferent to the people around it,” the song reflects on the real-life tension between personal experience and a city’s transformation that mirrors what so many other locations are currently grappling with.
The band’s 2023 LP Find Out dishes out confrontational hardcore punk across 14 tracks with bangers such as “Pressure Me” and “Signal Decay.” With Impossible World, the band stays true to its DIY roots and tries to provide answers on what it means to live in today’s world.
Survival during a tumultuous time is a prominent theme of the record, particularly the intrusion of AI into our online existence and how it shapes experiences, something that the band has been concerned about. McClelland says that the focus on it is part of making the album into something that touches on universal experiences. “Part of what we talked about is that these things keep happening to all of us, so these themes touch on things that tap into the human experience,” he says. “There are things that are pushed onto people by platforms that are all bigger than us and we all have to deal with it.”
Rage around this can be found within the music with melancholy seeping in lyrically. “It’s the experience of trying to overcome a lot of those tribulations. In the modern era, a lot of that can come down to how to communicate with people and we have a lot more barriers now than you used to. We’re trying to reach out and find ways to connect through all of the noise.”
D’Angelo agrees that “it’s a tricky thing” to navigate. “You never want to come off as being cliche when talking about social media. We all know that’s been done so many times. We can’t help but feel that every single day, when your phone is right there and you have constant access. Social media does play into this record and the lyrics quite a bit and how social media serves you as an individual and how you work through that without the cliches and trying to avoid those traps.”
Coming from an “environment of community music in Seattle,” McClelland cites the punk scene as one where social media is supposed to help one connect with others in their community but the “enshiftication” of the platforms have “become barriers to community,” saying that “although it’s never been easier to put yourself out there, you now have to fight through everything to find your friends.”
The lead single of the record titled “Stay Melted” exposes the hypocrisy of the rise of Christofascism in the US, a striking lyric getting at the heart of the matter: “To want to injure is human/ to want to kill is divine.” McClelland explains the lyrics in this manner: “To want to injure is human means that it’s okay to have conflict but to want to kill is divine, those are the concepts that are fed to you from somewhere else. That’s trying to separate you from your community and trying to split you off from building community and connecting and understanding people. We were attacking some of that thought. Stay grounded, push forward, find your people, dig in.”
Partly inspired by the Dylan Thomas poem “Do not go gentle into that good night,“ D’Angelo says that the recent current events and the protests that occurred in Seattle inspired her to write a call to resist and one of rage, a reminder that one can still feel alive even if everything is collapsing around them, writing it with McClelland. McClelland expands on how the instrumentation gives feeling to the track. “Thematically, he was throwing some things at me and suddenly we wrote the lyrics.”
“From an instrumental standpoint, ‘Stay Melted’ feels a little off kilter but moves forward and has a focused energy in that mid-tempo. To me that’s a reminder to stay grounded when things are spiraling away from you. The way that Lis put the lyrics together, there’s a lot of really cool ideas in there. ‘Die lit/ Stay Melted’ means ‘keep your eye on the prize’ and keep pushing forward.”
Impossible World is a record that saw the band break into new sonic territory and conjure up an adventurous spirit through collaboration. With D’Angelo’s raw vocals and the lyric’s urgency, the band expertly weaves raw intensity, harmony, and clean restraint into an emotionally resonant listening experience. Tracks such as “So Below” feature Fall Out Boy’s Joe Trohman while Baroness’ Gina Gleason contributes to “Desire” and Lauren Lavin provides support on “Long Way.” McClelland says of the collaborators on the album that there are “so many talented people come from punk music and resistance culture and there’s always someone fucking with you, there’s always oppression culture and punk is that energy that we need to tap into just to survive these days. It’s great to share that with people and have that be recognized.”
The single “Bad Faith” holds a personal meaning for D’Angelo. Taking in a deep breath, D’Angelo dives into her personal and familial history with religion. “I was born and raised Catholic and my family was really Catholic, had the priest over for dinner and my grandma donated all her money to the church when she passed away. It was a ritual for everyone in the family. My aunt is a Mother Superior of a convent in the US, so those roots run deep. I’ve always found it challenging because I would ask questions my whole life and I would never get a good answer. I never felt like those answers came with any real thought and one of the things that was always an excuse for having a shitty answer was ‘just have faith.’ When you talk to anybody and ask, ‘why do you believe what you believe?’ it’s ‘I have faith’ Have faith in what? I just don’t understand it. You can go in a circle, but I just find that at the very core of religion, there is a reflex to fall on that all the time and have that be your weapon, it’s just that there’s nothing there. It’s not real, so I don’t know. I struggle with it to this day.”
D’Angelo recounts the experience of coming out to her aunt and how it confounded her that her relative was not accepting of her. “I came out to my aunt, the one who’s the Mother Superior of a convent, and I had a conversation with her, and it was ‘I love you, but I don’t accept you as this thing.’ and it was just this very powerful moment where I was like ‘This is insane. This is my family and that’s your answer and it’s because of her faith. That’s her reason for why I wasn’t accepted when I came out. My faith says that I can’t accept you and I’m just like “WHAT?”’ I know that’s a really personal example of why I wrote that song, but I know that it can apply to something much greater. There are other meanings in there, but that’s the truth behind it.”
McClelland also comes from a religious household and never connected with it, like D’Angelo. “You can ask questions and you can zoom out and look at the world in the way it really is and there’s no good explanation for it. All you get in response is things that separate you from other people that genuinely care. We see that more and more in modern society where everyone has a desire for some level of spirituality. We used to connect with the Earth, but then there’s this control mechanism and narrative that’s pushed onto everyone that’s meant to separate you and assimilate you with certain ideas and that separates you from critical thinking and your own money. You see these megachurches that ask for donations and all they do is they pay out pastors driving Rolls Royces and you move away from spirituality, meditation, and spiritual centering that humans really need into these mechanisms of control and oppression. You always have to zoom out and ask questions and look to see if there’s a real benefit.”
McClelland understands that need for community but wants people to “take a good, hard look and assess the system you’re participating in” when linked to oppression and control.
The band wants to show that they understand the anxiety and fear that currently permeates the world, being a “dash of light that overwhelms the senses.” “I hope that when listeners listen to the record and read the lyrics that they get a sense of us being here and understanding because we’re going through the exact same thing. When you start to feel disassociation, that’s a natural result of survival and that’s just as much a part of it. That light comes from making sure that you don’t forget things like your voice does matter like in ‘Hellfire’ which talks about not losing your voice and understanding how much power one single voice can have. When you show up to a protest or have a conversation online, just don’t give up and don’t become so disassociated that you think that you’re powerless in this. The light comes in knowing that you have more power than you realize. Yes, it can feel crazy and we’re all feeling that exact same thing, but just don’t give up. That’s how we’re going to create change. We stay engaged,” says D’Angelo.
McClelland says that the band came up with the title Impossible World and its connecting theme early on, they were thinking about how to bring it to life. A thought that popped for the guitarist was “when your dreams feel impossible in the world, you have to make the impossible happen. You have to find a way to get through it, get over it, and get it done. You have to do everything in your power and that’s hopefully a rallying call to just remember that power that we all have, to join together, get out there, and get it done.”
Impossible World is out today, and you can order it from MNRK Heavy. Follow Filth is Eternal on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for future updates.
