ninehertz

The poetically titled Liquid Shit crawl out of the London sewers to vomit out into the world their fourth EP, You Suffer for a Long Time, Dry Cough Records holding back their hair as they do so in the role of co-conspirators.

They’ve always plied the grimiest of death-crusted sludge bubbling, gurgling commotion, but this feels a level descended even by their standards. They exist in the cracks in the walls down the dark and dangerous alleyways between death-doom, sludge and hardcore, but seem to have added something here – the release promotion cites Today is the Day’s unhinged disposition and that makes a lot of sense.

You hear it in the restraint, which is more common than the anticipated bludgeon, a stalking threat of strange hardcore meets mystical death metal. Add in the pessimism-inducing death-doom vocals, mired into the subtly fluctuating fog of noise, with the lurching sludge stomp, and it’s an impressive concoction.

There’s a meandering ghostly mystique to it all, despite its gruff exterior, intoxicated and intoxicating, at times feeling undirected and aimless but all the more electric because of it. Heading into this release, particularly if you are not acquainted with Liquid Shit prior, you’d expect to be battered and bruised into submission, but it is in the potent swirling atmospherics that it catches you, whilst still not giving a quarter in terms of its disembodied and harrowing sludge reach.