Frequent readers of New Noise know I love philosophy probably too much, but who should be shocked that someone who doesn’t create music but analyzes the work of others perhaps might enjoy overthinking? When Cork-based post-everything band God Alone leaned into Absurdism in their artwork, that was catnip to these Camus-loving ears. Technically (pulls up glasses from nose), it’s less of a formal school of thought and more of a middle finger to existentialism, saying that the search for meaning is absurd, so let’s embrace it and live in joy and defiance anyway. Given the fact that nothing means anything anymore (except love and art), it’s an easy slope to sink into. The Beep Test, out October 10 via Prosthetic Records, is God Alone’s most gleeful release yet.
While the band have morphed from post-black metal to noise rock to post-punk to math rock to electronic, it’s fair to question how the hell they can make all of that work. The Beep Test (I asked; the titled has no clear meaning) is oddly both God Alone’s most diverse and most cohesive record yet. Spanning a gnarlier version of mid-career Converge to sludgy noise riffs to what I can only describe as the best garage rock revival song to exist (only two decades late to the party) – the result is a record that leans into one key rule: does it bring a smile to your face and does it confuse on first listen. Seriously, how the band pulled off the transition from “Tony Gawk” to “Pink Himalayan” should be studied in a lab. It’s math rock for people whose only calculator is on their phone. So how did God Alone KFC Double Down on their eclectic nature?
“This album was different from our previous releases because it was largely written during Covid,” O’Driscoll says, “when we couldn’t rehearse and write in the same room like we would usually. Using Ableton Live as a writing tool does kind of push you down a certain path which is where the pop-sounding songs like ‘Pink Himalayan’ came from. It takes time and isolation to come up with poppier, more cohesive music, but it’s useful for editing and intently listening to what’s really working. Whereas heavier songs like ‘Tony Gawk’ have to be a collaborative effort all in the room together. We just had a better idea of what we really wanted this time, so the genre-bending we always try to push came together much quicker and more coherently.”
“We’ve all branched out individually in the years since we formed the band in what we listen to and the music we play with other people outside of God Alone,” Mullane adds. “This is a big factor in us coming together and making the music we do now. We all have a soft spot for extreme metal still, but were much more confident now in amalgamating any style of music one of us might be into at the time into a section or song, if we’re all in agreement that it’d work best. Anything we like to listen to, we’re happy to take influence from and try to recreate. Whether it was one of us writing and recording at home or a collective effort in the rehearsal space we feel that a lot of our songs tend to flow naturally from our collective idea of ‘this would be fun to play live’ regardless of genre or any other convictions.”
The Beep Test understands the value of the full album experience and turning cool ideas into cohesion:
“Track sequencing is so important,” O’Driscoll says, “and it’s definitely overlooked a lot of the time. We really tried to create a flow on this album. It just comes down to the way that we used to write longer songs with loads of sections changing constantly. On this album there were less collections of riffs and more fleshed-out parts, meaning the songs then became the sections we had to organize. It definitely makes an album feel more like an album and less like a collection of songs. We’ve also recently started incorporating improvised interludes into our live sets so we’re constantly thinking about how the songs can be interconnected more seamlessly.”
“For this album in particular,” Mullane continues, “we were adhering to the method of trying to keep your CV to only one page. Our older material featured a lot more extended instrumental sections, but now we all have jobs and places to be, so our writing process has definitely changed and progressed as we’ve gotten older. It’s getting easier and easier for us to write songs together collectively, and we’re all happy with the idea of making this album more concise and to the point.”
So clearly I’ve found a wealth of meaning in a record that has its ties in meaningless; what’s the point of that as a goal for the band? It’s fun, primarily:
“We definitely love the idea of absurdism,” O’Driscoll states, “and also how people attach meaning to things that aren’t really there. All of our lyrics are actually just kind of meaningless vignettes of phrases we think work well with the music. It’s fun seeing people read into them and attach deeper meanings to what is usually nothing. We find that really funny anyway.”
The Beep Test is out Friday from Prosthetic Records, and you can presave it here. Follow God Alone on Instagram for future updates.
Photo Credit: Shane Horan
