New York, NY (Top40 Charts) GELD have established themselves as the forerunners of a new breed of deranged, progressive punk and hardcore across Melbourne's teeming scene. While oft compared to the athletic determination of Equalizing Distort-era Gauze, or the motorik-flying-off-the-rails, oddball sensibility of Hawkwind, Geld's approach to hardcore on their forthcoming album, Currency // Castration bears closer spiritual resemblance to the throbbing, crushingly direct orientation of industrial dance music.
Each song is executed at the edge of the band's compositional ability, surgically worked and reworked with the sole purpose of maximizing the percussive tension between momentum and inertia, creating a wall of sound which offers catharsis only through the direct build up and release of a maddening energy.
Their new single and album centerpiece, "The Fix Is In" lyrically and sonically embraces the transcendence of pushing further into one's misanthropy and alienation. It regards, without romanticism, the anarchic depravity of living within a failed psyche, a failed society, a failed world disintegrating into a Gestalt psychic scream. It is the sound of mad laughter that accompanies the refusal to embrace delusion-simply acknowledging that your life is spiraling towards the abyss is never enough to prevent it from happening all the same.
It's available today with an accompanying music video by New Zealand documentarian Lance Downing (AKA Short Sharp Shock) and is a suitably deranged maelstrom of psychedelic terror.
Since their debut LP Perfect Texture (Iron Lung Records and Static Shock Records), and its rapid successors Soft Power EP and Beyond the Floor LP, Geld have progressively pushed their sound towards a heavier, dirge-inflected register. On Currency // Castration, Geld's third LP-and first with Relapse Records- their miasmic excess gets a facelift. The result is a stripped bare, streamlined take upon hardcore in its purest form, reconstituted into a heavy, psychedelic dose of amphetamine thrills.
On Currency // Castration, Geld render the dissociation and isolation of modern living with exacting precision. The album unfurls like a series of infinite reflections breaking down into fractal chaos-it becomes increasingly unclear whether one's suffering comes from the outside world, or from the confines of one's own skull. They've distilled a despairingly hellish vision of the world into a thundering crack to the temple, a naked and unsparing fusion of hardcore's bleakest violence with metal's ruthless strength-through-conviction.
Recorded across the Southern Winter Solstice of June 2022, Currency // Castration is Geld's most collaboratively written record to date. Although the writing process began with an initial desire to write a raging, straight-forward post-pandemic hardcore EP, this attempted exorcism of Geld's isolation-driven fascinations quickly spilled out into a full-length's worth of material, taking upon a fervor and mind of its own.
With Currency // Castration, Geld offer no promise of a higher purpose or resolve. Rather, they lean into dissociation, finding truth and meaning in the transcendental joy of simply escaping, surviving, existing. Their sound will find a welcome home with those who have found their purpose in the dejection of outsider music and outcast art.
Geld Live Dates:
Apr 28: Melbourne, VIC - Howler
Jun 03: Sydney, NSW - Metro Theatre
Jun 09: Northcote, VIC - Northcote Social Club (Record Release Show)
Jul 15: Brisbane, QLD - The Triffid
Jul 21: Melbourne, VIC - Bendigo Hotel
Jul 22: Frankston, VIC - Singing Bird (ALL AGES)
