Australia’s Geld recently signed with Relapse Records for their upcoming LP, Currency // Castration, set to release on June 9. Geld’s approach to hardcore on the forthcoming album bears closer spiritual resemblance to the throbbing, crushingly direct orientation of industrial dance music. Each song is executed at the edge of the band’s compositional ability, surgically worked and reworked with the sole purpose of maximizing the percussive tension between momentum and inertia, creating a wall of sound which offers catharsis only through the direct build up and release of a maddening energy.
Their new single and album centerpiece, “The Fix Is In,” lyrically and sonically embraces the transcendence of pushing further into one’s misanthropy and alienation. It regards, without romanticism, the anarchic depravity of living within a failed psyche, a failed society, a failed world disintegrating into a Gestalt psychic scream. It is the sound of mad laughter that accompanies the refusal to embrace delusion—simply acknowledging that your life is spiraling towards the abyss is never enough to prevent it from happening all the same. The single comes accompanied with a music video by New Zealand documentarian Lance Downing (AKA Short Sharp Shock) and is a suitably deranged maelstrom of psychedelic terror.
Currency // Castration Tracklist:
1. Currency
2. Chained to a Gate
3. Cut You Down
4. Clock Keeps Crawling
5. Fog of War
6. The Fix Is In
7. Across A Broad Plain
8. Hanging From a Rope
9. Gas of Corruption
10. Success
11. Secret Prison
12. Castration
Cutting their teeth in the gutters of Melbourne’s teeming punk and hardcore scene, Geld established themselves as the forerunners of a new breed of deranged aggression with their first LP, Perfect Texture (Iron Lung Records and Static Shock Records). This record was followed in quick succession by their EP, Soft Power, and LP, Beyond the Floor, releases which saw the band progressively push their sound towards a heavier, dirge-inflected register.
On Geld’s third LP, the band’s debut with Relapse Records, their miasmic excess gets a facelift. The result is a stripped bare, streamlined take upon hardcore in its purest form, reconstituted into a heavy, psychedelic dose of amphetamine thrills. With Currency // Castration, Geld offer no promise of a higher purpose or resolve. Rather, they lean into dissociation, finding truth and meaning in the transcendental joy of simply escaping, surviving, existing. Their sound will find a welcome home with those who have found their purpose in the dejection of outsider music and outcast art.
Recorded across the Southern Winter Solstice of June 2022, Currency // Castration is Geld’s most collaboratively written record to date. Although the writing process began with an initial desire to write a raging, straight-forward post-pandemic hardcore EP, this attempted exorcism of Geld’s isolation-driven fascinations quickly spilled out into a full-length’s worth of material, taking upon a fervor and mind of its own.
Upcoming Geld Tour Dates:
Apr 28: Melbourne, VIC – Howler
Jun 03: Sydney, NSW – Metro Theatre
Jun 09: Northcote, VIC – Northcote Social Club (Record Release Show)
Jul 15: Brisbane, QLD – The Triffid
Jul 21: Melbourne, VIC – Bendigo Hotel
Jul 22: Frankston, VIC – Singing Bird (ALL AGES)
North American dates TBA…
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Watch the video for “The Fix Is In” by Geld here:
Preorder Currency // Castration by Geld here, and follow the band here.
Photo courtesy of Anita Shao
