Exclusive Early Album Premiere: Hell is Other People’s Moirae

October 10, 2024

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“It’s like a small black shutter that clicks down and makes a break.”

On Friday October 11, the Windsor, Ontario-based black metal act Hell is Other People will release their new LP Moirae on Transcending Obscurity Records. 7 winters have come and gone since the band’s debut record Embrace, a 4-song long player that saw the band take its first steps away from its post-hardcore beginnings towards a fully blackened sound. You will notice right away on Embrace the influence of Celeste and Altar of Plagues on the band, and while those bands still remain relevant to Hell is Other People’s sound in 2024, Embrace is sonically distinct. There’s a more frantic edge to the first record, an existential itchiness that the band seems determined to scratch with a chaotic energy that nods towards the worlds of post-black metal and atmospheric black metal but can’t quite let go of the turmoil.

After 7 years, the band feels more comfortable in the devouring omnicrisis of our times—and perhaps more suited to meet that moment. “In the extremity of too late capitalism,” writes Anna Kornbluh, “distance evaporates, thought ebbs, intensity gulps.” On Moirae, an album named for three figures in Ancient Greek mythology that “ensure that everyone lives out their destiny as assigned to them by the laws of the universe,” Hell is Other People toil in “metaphor and esoteric meaning so the listener can interpret them as they see fit.” Esoteric, interpretation, and meaning-making are, phrased differently, just what Kornbluh prescribes: “Prolonged attention, belabored descriptions, and counterintuitive pattern recognition will, one hopes…. [check] the individuated ‘I’ complex of the private contemporary will motivate the convocation of a ‘we.'” While the story of Moirae is one of warring against yet ultimately succumbing to destiny and a dissolution into the earth, the ethos of the album is to join us together in such a “convocation of a ‘we'” that might be able to find an immensity of open space, a return of thoughtfulness, and intensity that no longer swallows us but that pulls us together.

As I noted in January, Hell is Other People takes up a richly and comfortably emotional post-black metal sound, one that resonates with bands such as Deafheaven, Harakiri for the Sky, and Agalloch. Long, explorative passages let the band breathe with a sense of solemnity and gravity on Moirae that felt more choked with rage on Embrace. From the mid-paced opening of “Moirae” that briefly flirts with a kind of post-metal heaviness, you can already feel a sense of wider contemplation. Not for the first time on the album will a mournful guitar harmony spread itself over the post-black sprawl, its soft, ringing appeal wringing out of the listener’s heart. It is over 3 minutes before we hear from bassist/vocalist Nathan Ferreira, an echoing bellow up from the depths of the maw of omnicrisis that soon curdles into a black metal wail, as the band starts shifting through that beautiful lead, a relentless double-bass beat punctuated by an almost incessant crash of cymbals. This brief eruption of activity, a kind of affective apotheosis, retreats back into the long, slow, and open sprawl of the track’s beginning.

This is a thoughtful, pensive album, one that moves along a clear narrative arc. It is also, at times, a desperately sad yet unwaveringly resolved album. It is girded by fortitude just as it is undone by the pathologies of living. It is an album that understands the end, or perhaps even The End, is as inescapable as the torment of being the object of the other’s look. There is, in fact, no exit out of this. What we do with that time—that time before Atropos, the eldest Fate known as “Inflexible One,” comes to cut our tether to life—however, is entirely our decision. “Atropos,” the album’s final track, is a huge 13-minute affair, its own journey at the end of the longer journey of Moirae. After moments of veritable quiet, the song blares with a bright, blinding shrillness, each moment puncturing and punctuating, as if to mark a rupture and foreclose that rupture simultaneously. Fate sealed and unsealed and resealed in an inescapable cycle.

What a pleasure, then, though not an emotionally freighted pleasure, to provide for our dear readers an exclusive early stream of Moirae a day before it officially releases. Think of this early release as a chance to acquaint yourself with a record that, with each listen, deepens and deepens, spreading its blackened roots further into the loamy soil that, on our scorched planet, grows and blossoms catastrophe in the garden of our lives. These are initial impressions that will, with time and patience and attention and thought and willingness, give way to new and different ideas. What will you notice and feel with each subsequent listen?

About the album, the band has this to say:

Thank you for checking out our new album. This was years of hard work and fine-tuning and we’ve been very happy to see the response to the advance singles. We hope that we’ve created something that draws on raw emotions in a way that only music can truly do, and inspires you the same way our favorite bands inspire us. As an artist, there’s not much more you can ask for.

Kornbluh understands this kind of artistic mediation, this type of emotional meditation, as “representation in excess of messaging, creativity in excess of use, giving sensuous form to the unexpressed,” and acknowledges it as a “fundamental human activity.” What Hell is Other People has given us with Moirae is something in excess of the demands of the hyper-reality of too late capitalism and omnicrisis. It boils over, it exceeds its boundaries, it presses the listener to disengage from that world and to reengage with something more artistic, more mediated, more organic, more thoughtful, more evocative.

We cannot escape our fate, it is true. But we can do something different before Atropos has her say. Hit play below and find out just what that might be.