Photo Credit: Stewart Baxter
UK blackened sludge five-piece Mastiff have released their new video for ‘Midnight Creeper’. Premiered via Brooklyn Vegan, the track is the third to be taken from their devastatingly heavy Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth album, set for release on 10th September via eOne.
‘Midnight Creeper’ picks up where the previously released single ‘Repulse’ left off. Sonically, it stands among the most chaotic and savage moments of Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth whilst lyrically, it’s the record’s most enraged. It is a brutal blackened grind track that cements Mastiff as true contenders in the extreme metal scene.
View Mastiff‘s ‘Midnight Creeper’ video here: https://youtu.be/YinARs1vcec
Pre-order Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth here: https://www.mastiff-hchc.com
Commenting on the video, the band said: “Our mindset when writing ‘Midnight Creeper’ was along the lines of, ‘what if Will Haven was a grindcore band?.’ The song originally had a whole extra part at the end, but after months of sitting on the song during the first lockdown in 2020, we revisited it and realised it was totally not needed, and that the grind part that ends the song now was a far more fitting way to disorient and bamboozle people.
“Lyrically, ‘Midnight Creeper’ is one of the more personal and angry tracks on Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth and deals pretty directly with a person who was very close to the band and that we all considered a friend, who was unceremoniously outed as a predator and a liar. The feeling of disgust and betrayal within our musical community hung over us for a long time and we wanted to make a clear statement that we stand behind victims, we abhor abusers, and that consent is everything. That we picked one of our most brutal songs to convey that message seemed fitting, really.”
Crafted in just five days at No Studio with producer Joe Clayton (Pijn, Wren, Leeched), the band’s third full-length, Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth, is a misanthropic masterpiece. The sorrow-filled souls of every miserable cretin it reaches will stir in basements, hovels, pubs, and darkened alleyways. Conceived during a pandemic-enforced longest stretch between Mastiff records, the album paints on the band’s familiar canvas, but with a far larger palette than ever before.
Forged in 2014, Mastiff’s unique combination of blackened sludge, grindcore, and powerviolence creates a bleak and chaotic atmosphere, sounding as if the spawn of Crowbar, This Is Hell, and Napalm Death composed an album inside the Lake Of Fire. The unrelenting, brutish curmudgeon aura of Mastiff can be deceptive however, as bright sparks of nuance and jarring adventurousness lurk behind every riff, rumble, and anguished, painstaking bellow stitching together a soundtrack suitable for betrayal, depression, self-loathing, and total despair, with winking, devilish glee. The bulldozing din of Mastiff is akin to the catharsis in setting something aflame just to watch it burn.
View Mastiff‘s previously released video ‘Endless’ here and ‘Repulse’ here.
Mastiff will bring their odes of antipathy to stages this autumn on a short UK run with Calligram. See all confirmed dates below:
Mastiff w/ Calligram:
10/26/2021 The Anvil – Bournemouth, UK
10/27/2021 Black Heart – London, UK
10/28/2021 Satan’s Hollow – Manchester, UK
10/29/2021 Opium – Edinburgh, UK
10/30/2021 SOAR – Nottingham, UK
10/31/2021 Record Junkee – Sheffield, UK
About Mastiff:
A miserable band from a miserable town. Mastiff hails from a tiny port city called Kingston Upon Hull, founded by 12th-century monks, and bombed to the brink of obliteration during World War II. Over the years, spiraling social depravity, poor education, and crushing economic collapse pummeled the English town, rendering it dreary and inhospitable. Hull is the end of the road for many, literally and figuratively, as its geographical location ensures that it’s not quite on the way to anywhere. It’s a specific type of human-made hell in which some folks seem destined to die without ever having left. It’s also the kind of place capable of grotesque beauty where suffocated artists might thrive.
Thank heavens for Hull, then, because Mastiff churns out delightfully depressing missives of misanthropy. Determinedly swaying between harrowing bleakness and hateful immorality, Mastiff weaponises their world-weariness and wit with brutal sludge and volatile, raw, hardcore grind. If a festival featuring Napalm Death, Nails, Converge, and Tragedy somehow survived a “Hull Blitz” of the nuclear variety to emerge as a post-apocalyptic, five-headed beast? Its name would be Mastiff.
A pair of early EP outbursts summoned a furious fuzzed-out thunder, reminiscent of the sludgy bar room brawl rock favored in New Orleans, with shades of the darkness cloaking fellow English bands of the doomier variety. Wrank (2016) and the Bork EP (2017) furthered the despair and paranoia.
And then sophomore album Plague blew the damn doors down. Recorded live-in-the-studio in just two days, Plague demonstrated Mastiff’s seamless shapeshifting from harsh noise to blackened hardcore and back again. The sludge still seeped from the foundations, like a foul stench from under the floorboards. Despite the raw recording setting, Mastiff somehow sounded more polished and less restrained at the same time. A slew of stark raving reviews from sometimes disgust-adverse tastemakers like Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, and Metal Injection symbolised Mastiff’s momentum.
Mastiff put their open-wound sound and spirit on display at shows with Crowbar, Biohazard, Conjurer, Cult Leader, and Iron Monkey, among others. They’ve proved adept and capable at delivering devastating performances with a diverse cross-section of heavy acts and their respective audiences. Festival appearances propelled the band’s miserable might, deepening a nascent cult status.
Mastiff are:
Jim Hodge – vocals
James Andrew Lee – guitar
Phil Johnson – guitar
Dan Dolby – bass
Michael Shepherd – drums
Mastiff online:
Website || Facebook || Twitter || Bandcamp || Instagram || Spotify
Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth Tracklisting:
1. The Hiss
2. Fail
3. Repulse
4. Midnight Creeper
5. Beige Sabbath
6. Futile
7. Endless
8. Scalped And Salted
9. Lung Rust
