Shock Narcotic

stream Shock Narcotic's 'I Have Seen The Future And It Doesn't Work'

I assume an album called I Have Seen The Future And It Doesn’t Work is about “dystopian dread” (as the press release puts it), though — without a lyric sheet — I couldn’t tell you for sure what any of these unintelligible 45-second to two-minute blasts of grindcore are about. Still, that title mixed with the unrelenting fury of this album makes for exactly the kind of cathartic release you need when you feel like you’re suffocating from helplessness and the feeling of doubt that things will ever get better.

Over the course of the 14 songs that make up their debut, Shock Narcotic — who include current and former members of The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Black Dahlia Murder, Child Bite and Battlecross among their ranks, plus guest vocalist Dylan Walker of Full of Hell on this album — specialize in a type of grind that bottles up all the anger and unrest that a lot of us are feeling right now, and spits it back out with venom. It’s a total sonic assault, and as dystopian as it might be, it’s an album with modest production and lifelike screams that remind you it was made by humans who walk the same earth as we do. The album is bookended by two comparatively slower tracks, but other than that, the only time Shock Narcotic let up from the album’s relentless wrath is for “An Obsession Supreme,” a dose of Swans-like doom that’s arguably even more dreadful than the rest.

I Have Seen The Future And It Doesn’t Work comes out this Friday (8/16) via Housecore Records (pre-order digital or physical), but a full stream premieres early right here: