If you’ve wondered how it might feel to get suddenly torn apart from the inside out as though the universe itself suddenly devolved into a violent fit, venture into Hypervirulence Architecture, the new album from the Seattle-based extreme metal trio, Hissing, a July release from Profound Lore Records.
The quickly moving album sounds oriented around the thrill of rocketing past what’s most conventional to the point those frames of reference become simply irrelevant. Hissing have used “black death psychosis” to describe themselves in a social media bio, and that aptly reflects what’s going on here. Hypervirulence Architecture seems inescapably upending to whatever it may contact. Where something else might use stylistic familiarity in bringing in listeners, this employs surges of vicious mania. While united by relentless force, the record bends into startling, perceptibly unnatural shapes that suggest an onset of destruction.
The album’s lurching rhythms, which are thickly interwoven, build into an oppressive cloud, as though circling a foreboding, shadowy pit. The longer you look, the more you might wonder if you’ve somehow already been trapped inside. The instability and exploration involved in the journey Hissing take reaches a psychic level thanks to the sheer crushing force of it all. Even if a musical idea seems mirrored somewhere else on the album, potentially providing a sense of clarity, no feeling of stability ever really takes root. You’re getting scorched in simultaneity with any hint of that.
The staggered build-up on “Operant Extinction,” which passes 10 minutes, is particularly epic, as is the hypnotic repetition on “Identical to Hunger,” which evokes becoming fully enraptured by frenzy.
Noise doesn’t actually overpower those who might stop by, even if the frenetically cut paths seem whimsically demented. Instead, it seems inherently intriguing—the jumps across textural ideas mean Hypervirulence Architecture almost seems alive… although the creature doesn’t sound exactly thrilled to be here.
It’s a broad question, but: how would you describe this new album? Anybody could think of all sorts of things to say about it, but—in terms of sound or theme—what would you say?
Pickel: I’ll speak mostly from a drumming standpoint here—My intention was to inject a lurching and awkward feel into the tracks. If one wants to consider thematic elements of the drumming you could say I was trying to give the drums a “voice” that exemplified the confusion and absurdity of our times.
O’Malley: The album is spirited, strange, awkward, and intense. It’s the result of a process.
Wise: I think it exists outside of us at this point; it’s a weird, hostile creature we brought into the world for better or for worse.
Obviously, the music has a kind of thickness to it—There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in there. Where does something like this start? Was there specific ground you wanted to cover in creating this record, or was it more about just following along with where the songwriting went?
Wise: In the broadest sense, I think the only intention we had going into making it was that we wanted to improve upon and evolve everything we did with our previous record. Given how atypical the end product of our process, I think of our previous efforts as us trying to find the words of a new language to communicate in, and this one feels like starting to pull sentences and thoughts together in that language.
O’Malley: As three inept ‘musicians’ who never practice, the new ground we wanted to cover was tricking people into having a small feeling of confidence in our abilities. To do that we needed to play faster and use a cleaner production style. The thickness comes from playing to the limits of your abilities and gradually feeling more capable. We follow the songwriting or don’t.
Pickel: I agree with Joe for the most part here—I’ll say for myself that I do practice my instrument. Songwriting is nonlinear and has many dead-ends and impasses. Something always emerges, and we follow various lines until we arrive at a template on which to build. This probably results in the aforementioned “thickness.”
Wise: I would also like to add for the record that I do occasionally practice my instrument, too. But the songwriting occurs in the moment between the three of us, rather than the product of one of us meticulously plotting it all out beforehand.
Would you say that you intentionally made the album have its sort of oppressive flair? Was the physical—and emotional, really—intensity that’s there something you’d wanted to achieve?
O’Malley: Yes, the intention was to combine the intensity of attitude and the physicality of performance with the complexity and surprise of new and familiar emotion-tone juxtapositions and dialogues.
Wise: I’d say yes and no as far as intentionality is concerned in general. Things tend to transform in the process; everything is sort of grist for the mill for whatever the hell it is we’re doing. But obviously in general we want the music to be challenging and to demand something of the listener. We can’t make concessions; we just don’t work that way.
Pickel: I found myself trying to either over-simplify the drumming or make it as overplayed and strenuous as possible. It’s possible that this way of physically doing something added an atmosphere to the music, but that’s up to interpretation.
Whether or not there’s any kind of one-to-one relationship with anything on the new record, do you happen to take any inspiration from noise music? Do you listen to it much?
Pickel: The percussion-as-noise approach of Ted Byrnes was a large inspiration for many of the “noise” interludes on the record.
Wise: Referring to what is specifically delineated as “noise music” I’d say we all appreciate and participate in that tradition, to the point where maybe you could consider what we’re doing to be some kind of noise music. Once you open that Pandora’s box it’s hard to go back.
O’Malley: I don’t see the purpose in keeping “noise” away from anything else. For many people, music is rhythm, and movies are plot.
Are the themes particularly important for you in the songwriting process, or is it more about the sound of the music? How would you describe the thematic content of this album, if you haven’t already covered it?
O’Malley: The themes of lyrics and song titles are Zach’s response and interpretation of the music. The visual themes are also heavily Zach’s design work and collaborations with artists. The songwriting process for us mostly listens to itself without a guiding “theme.”
Wise: I develop the lyrics and the extra-musical elements almost entirely independently of the songwriting; when working as a group we always prioritize the sound itself. That said, the concept of the record emerged as a reflection of the world we inhabit as much as the songs themselves did, through processes both conscious and unconscious.
The lyrical theme of the record is difficult to put into simple terms, but the general idea is assorted dispatches from a nightmarish near-future where inhuman techno capital has induced a mass schizophrenic state in which the animate bodies of living humans and the inanimate machinery of industrial and information technology become confused. There is no possible reversal of this state of the world. It’s not a coherent narrative either, more a series of rhizomatic variations on a theme, like “Inland Empire” or the fiction of Robert Coover. Some of it I’m not even really sure the full meaning of; like the music itself it now exists outside of me.
Do you find yourself artistically inspired by non-musical things like, say, horror cinema? The music certainly seems to evoke that sort of thing.
O’Malley: Music for me is never really a mind’s eye narrative sort of thing. I think what’s powerful about music is that it doesn’t need to evoke anything relating to your life (if that’s possible). I can’t stand “cinematic” music.
Wise: We do discuss cinema quite a bit at practice, but not specifically horror. I think those themes are a bit played out in extreme metal. I’m really into the ’70s New Hollywood era, Schrader, Altman, etc., as well as Antonioni and Haneke. “The Seventh Continent” was a good reference point for an oppressive mood, but these are more thematic references for the mood of the lyrics. Like Joe said, we don’t draw from a cinematic attitude when it comes to the technical work of songwriting; our compositions are strictly in dialogue with their own internal logic and characteristics.
What do you feel makes a good black/ death metal album experience, if something comes to mind? When hitting play, is there something in particular you’re looking for?
Pickel: Any record that can come out sounding truly menacing is an accomplishment. I’ve listened to records where it felt like I was being warned. Whenever black or death metal can make you feel a purity of emotion or visceral physiological reaction there’s some degree of success occurring. An album that knows what it is and where technicality meets its correlate in terms of production style/vision is more likely to hit the spot.
O’Malley: The music has to invigorate, humor, and make you happy to be alive for a moment. It has to have a certain attitude and spirit of execution. Pure monstrosities, if they don’t succeed in this, just become fatiguing. Same goes for overachieving technicality. You can also have too much of a bad attitude such as all the toxic-man-vocals-too-loud shit out there.
Wise: For me, a clear sense of creativity and a strong vision is what keeps me coming back to the extreme metal records that I do listen to more than once. It’s apparent when people are trying to sound like something they wish they were vs. something they are. Be true to yourself.
Are there a lot of current bands you’re listening to and current things/ sounds you’re into? What do you like about them?
Pickel: Antediluvian continues to release records that far surpass most contemporary releases in terms of adherence to tradition and experimentation. Few groups can claim to be as forward-thinking and still make you bang your head. The Divine Punishment is the only album I’ve heard recently that also made me laugh. Death and black metal are pretty self-serious musical styles, and albums that give you the impression that the members are both serious about the music and aware of the absurdity of what they are doing are always refreshing.
Wise: Agreed, Antediluvian continues to be an inspiration, and their newest record is maybe their best yet. When I talk about a band with a unique vision who is unafraid to execute it, they stand head and shoulders above the rest. Our labelmates Suffering Hour and Aeviterne also both put out unique and crushing records in the last year-ish; check them out.
O’Malley: xeno-canto.org
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Listen to “Meltdown” here:
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Photo courtesy of Marena Shear
