Flush It Friday: Relentlessly Grief-Stricken
“Call a tulip a totem. Call a genocide a genocide.”
Let’s get poetic on this Marchiest of Flush it Fridays.
V/A – TDoV Compilation 1
She/Her Records | March 31, 2025
Opening with the pleading and heart-rending mournful pop of Rie Daisies’ “Resilience,” this compilation of transfemme artists moves through a plurality of sounds. Take in the lush indie-shoegaze of “Here,” It Looks Like Fire’s tender ambient glow, the goth-club-adjacent dance moves of “Paranoid,” Uboa’s splintering and refracting soft-harsh noise, and the charming, nigh-twee indie bop “that guy.” In a time when EO 14168 seeks to conjure up the phantasm of ‘gender ideology’ “for the purpose of opposing a raft of social policies benefiting women, children and trans, queer, non-binary and intersexed people,” any and all requisite resistance needs a radical soundtrack.
Secret Cutter – ///
Independent | March 20, 2025
Are you fucking kidding me? I guess it’s only right that a year as rotten as 2025 would force Secret Cutter back into existence. The band’s first record since 2018’s Quantum Eraser, /// is everything you expect and love from the Pennsylvania trio. Tracks like “Spleen” and “Humanoid” swagger about with drunken, reckless abandon. Opener “Subject to Change” and stand-out “Voice of the Tongueless” are as vituperative as Today is the Day, Eyehategod, or Crossed Out. “Ghosts of Our Youth” is a haunting dirge, while closer “Myriad” is all animus and spite. This is raw nerves, exposed flesh, leaking marrow.
Cages – Better Mistakes
Through Love Records | February 21, 2025
Formed from the ashes of We Had A Deal comes Ludwigsburg’s own Cages, playing the type of early 2000s skramz that is as violent as it gentle, hopeful as it is desolate, implacable as it is flexible. “The Metaphysics of Losing a Friend” alights like a scurried flock while a Snapcase-esque riffs keeps everything grounded. “My Wristwatch Tells Me When to Sleep,” tapping into the techno-anxiety of a sleepless digital world, cuts and jabs ruefully like Thursday mixed with AFI. It’s 2003 and emo bands have breakdowns. It’s 2003 and all we need is shows in makeshift venues. It’s 2003…
GAOLED – BESTIAL HARDCORE
Televised Suicide / Iron Lung | December 13, 2024
Following their 2023 live split with New South Wales’ Demolition gleefully titled Hardcore’s Hardest Hogs, Perth’s Gaoled are back with 14 tracks of blown-out barbarism and sneering savagery. Gaoled blend together powerviolence and hardcore into Some Kind of Hate-ful slurry that doesn’t relent so much as it takes gasping, bleeding breaths. The breakdown—if you want to call it that—that starts and ends “Waiting” is subhuman and primordial, dredged up from a Hobbesian past. Everything about Gaoled is atavistic, unevolved, degenerative. Don’t listen when you’re in a bad mood. I fear there may be consequences. As there should be.
Reekmind – Mired in the Reek of Grief
Night Terror Records | March 7, 2025
New South Wales’ Reekmind sit somewhere between the magnitude of old school death/doom, the solemnity of the darkest moments in post-metal, and the vitriol of sludge. Think Krypts meets Thou. There’s something poetic about the album’s bandcamp not listing the length of any of the songs: it marks the endlessness of grief as it exists in the fullness of time. “We could all be justifiably furious at all times / but our nervous systems would fail,” writes Maya Marshall. “I am grief turned fractal. Let fall the petals to the mouths / of millipedes, let compost feed waking dormant seeds.”
“Long live the spring, the spring is dead.” So let’s Flush!
Stick‘s Ordeal is hella Dormant in TMP. Roldy is a Pillar of Cacophany This Community in TTT.
Stevo says he’ll be your trad daddy after awarding 4.5 Flaming Toilets to the new Tower.
Falxifer gives a generous 2/5 to the new Underoath. Noathank you!
Joe n Jordan just start blastin’ on Toilet Radio 550. Folks, it’s a rotten one.
365 with an exclusive track premiere from Samiarus. Things are ugly, y’all.
Scrumptious, yumptious, and absolutely delumptious Minis from Hans and 365.
Will Falxifer ever listen to good music again? He spent some reflective time with the new album from The God ov Shit.
Jake‘s back and so is Arch Enemy. See what he thinks below!
“Apocalypse meaning: a great disaster. / This one is happening slowly (lobsters, a simmering pot). / There is time to course correct, /but group projects so often end in failure.” Ain’t that the truth, Maya! Put all your GBUs below or whatever. Heck, see if I care! <3 <3 <3
