Full of Hell Sharpen Their Teeth on Broken Sword, Rotten Shield

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #189. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

———

Ruminations on the power of the riff.

———

Over the past decade, sounds from obscure reaches of the heavy music world have made remarkable inroads into mainstream consciousness. Blackened post-metal act Deafheaven earned Best New Music accolades from Pitchfork.com for their landmark second album Sunbather, Turnstile have brought God’s honest hardcore to Coachella, and Blood Incantation have launched experimental death metal straight into the literal and figurative stratosphere. This is a short list of high-profile examples that illustrate the broader point that uncompromising heavy music is more easily discoverable than ever.

It would be presumptuous to predict that Maryland-based grindcore-infused death metal five-piece Full of Hell will ever follow a similar trajectory out of the underground and onto store shelves at Urban Outfitters. As it stands, they are one of the most dominant forces in the hardcore and metal worlds today, and that status has been hard-won over the course of countless tour dates and a relentless release schedule, with a discography that currently includes six studio albums, six collaborative albums with other bands, four live albums, eight split 7”s, and 10 EPs, few artists in any genre possess the work ethic and creative range necessary to keep their sound fresh while being so prolific.

Full of Hell’s latest release, the EP Broken Sword, Rotten Shield (available now via Closed Casket Activities) might not be the singular release that pushes the band’s notoriety over the top. Yet it has the feeling of being the precursor to whatever comes next that finally drives the breakthrough. It clocks in at a merciful 15 minutes, welding ripping death metal riffage with pummeling grindcore and harsh ambient noise in masterful fashion. This isn’t easy listening, but it avoids overstaying its welcome.

Broken Sword, Rotten Shield opens with a relentless tone-setting title track and quickly follows it up with mid-tempo groove on “From Dog’s Mouth, a Blessing.” The middle track “Lament of All Things” is bookended by a pair of ominous experimental ambient breaks in “Corpselight” and “Mirrorhelm,” the former layering lo-fi beats with distant shrieks and the latter leaning on sparse keys and mechanical textures. “Knights Oath” treads familiar mid-tempo death metal territory before closer “To Ruin and the World’s Ending” lumbers into the void.

As the final fractured shards of noise echo out on the EP, the quieter, more unsettling moments stick in your head as much as its thundering rage. These dark ambient passages hint at a creative range that extends beyond brutal brevity. It’s a side of their sound they explored in more depth on their grimly beautiful collaboration album When No Birds Sang with renowned Philadelphia shoegazers Nothing, which also demonstrated they are capable of delivering more than crushing riffage (which, to be clear, they excel at better than most). If they wanted to stretch into more melodious territory in the future, the results would probably be incredible. They’ve proven they can do it in a collaborative context, and they’ve hinted here they can do it on their own too.

The only question is whether their creative muse might lead them in such a direction. It might be the quickest path to catching the attention of non-metal critics and finding a broader audience. They’d likely say their sound had “matured,” a term that can sometimes be a loaded word that implies artistic maturation has to come at the expense of aggression. This suggests that anger should be suppressed rather than harnessed, that aggression is something bands need to move beyond before being taken seriously.

None of these cynical presumptions are accurate by default. Certainly, exploring tones and textures outside of metal’s conventional boundaries can reflect growth and daring creative ambition; Deafheaven’s decision to lean into the ambient and melodic sides of their sound on Infinite Granite is a recent case study. So are Turnstile’s pop-tinged inflections on Glow On and Blood Incantation’s electronic experimentation on Absolute Elsewhere. These are excellent albums that took bold creative risks within subgenres that don’t always respond well to bands coloring outside the lines.

Yet Full of Hell may have shown us there is another way forward. Rather than stepping outside the boundaries of aggressive music, Broken Sword, Rotten Shield sees the band finding new pathways that bridge between metallic subgenres and delivering another strong statement that further establishes exactly why they are one of the most respected bands in metal today. If they wanted to court critical prestige by balancing beauty with brutality, those accolades appear to be theirs for the taking. They have the chops and range to make it happen, without abandoning the essence of who they are.

But maybe asking what Full of Hell could do to court mainstream attention is the wrong question to pose. Maybe it’s time for the mainstream to wake up to what they’ve been missing. Forcing the world to meet them on their terms feels more in line with Full of Hell’s confrontational style, and Broken Sword, Rotten Shield offers a suitably ugly but digestible introduction to their brutal oeuvre. A bigger breakthrough may or may not be waiting around the corner, but given their work ethic and indomitable spirit, we can rest assured of this: whatever Full of Hell accomplishes, it will be done without compromise.

———

Ben Sailer is a writer based out of Fargo, ND, where he survives the cold with his wife and dog. His writing also regularly appears in New Noise Magazine.