Photo by Stewart Baxter
September 3rd, 2021 – The UK blackened sludge bringers in MASTIFF today reveals a video for “Midnight Creeper.” Now playing at BrooklynVegan, the track appears on the band’s punishing Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth full-length, scheduled for release September 10th via Entertainment One.
Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth is MASTIFF’s third full-length and a true misanthropic masterpiece. Crafted in just five days at No Studio with producer Joe Clayton (Pijn, Wren, Leeched) and conceived during a pandemic-enforced longest stretch between MASTIFF records, the album paints on the band’s familiar canvas of desolation, but with a far larger palette than ever before
“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 while 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.
Issues the band, “Our mindset when writing ‘Midnight Creeper’ was something along the lines of, ‘what if Will Haven was a grindcore band?,’ and we’re pretty happy with the results. 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 realized 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… 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.”
Adds BrooklynVegan, “The song is a genre-fluid metalpunk rager that touches on black, sludge, grind, and hardcore, and the video plays out like a campy, tongue-in-cheek slasher flick.”
View MASTIFF’s “Midnight Creeper,” at BrooklynVegan HERE.
View MASTIFF’s previously released video “Endless” HERE and “Repulse”HERE.
Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth will be released on CD, LP, and digital formats. Find preordering options at THIS LOCATION.
MASTIFF will bring their odes of antipathy to stages this Fall 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 Percy Picklebackers – Nottingham, UK
10/31/2021 Record Junkee – Sheffield, UK
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.
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 symbolized 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.
“It’s the type of music that’s bound to test the stability of a venue’s floorboards, because it’s just one thudding, hurling riff and/or breakdown after another.” — Revolver
“The band fluidly — and consistently — moves from sludge to black metal to grind and hardcore, held together by an overreaching tone of misery and [Jim] Hodge’s distorted bellow that sounds like the microphone is cracking apart.” — Decibel
“A finely sculpted mess of fury…” — Metal Injection
MASTIFF:
Jim Hodge – vocals
James Andrew Lee – guitar
Phil Johnson – guitar
Dan Dolby – bass
Michael Shepherd – drums
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