That Know//Suffer hail from Texas makes a lot of sense. The El Paso quintet’s music is appropriately huge, coming at listeners with churlish riffs and bellowed vocals that feel meant to overwhelm and dominate from the outset. At the same time, the band don’t fall into the typical traps of the genre; their music isn’t the nonstop guttural churn about horror-movie torture fantasies that plenty of other bands seem intent to settle on. There’s a vitality to the band, a sense of real lives having been lived behind this crushing sound. Only in America’s biggest, most ostentatious wasteland could this music be born.
On their new EP The Great Dying, Know//Suffer contort their unique sound in ways that no other band could. Sure, the riffs have the weight of stars and the atmosphere or large predatory reptiles, and the vocals sound like they’re screamed at the listener by whoever tied them to the chair. But the band are never typical or by-the-numbers; the songs on the EP are dotted with enough Gojiran guitar dynamics and old-school hardcore unpredictability that they’re perpetually ominous and exciting. In this way, The Great Dying sounds like a byproduct of our hideous modern world, a no-bullshit stampede of energetic contempt without any pretense about tearing the bastards down and standing on their necks.
“We’ve never strived to sound like anyone else and we don’t really compare our music to any other band,” says guitarist Jerry Griffin. “Black Power and Brown Pride came together at a critical moment to make this band. El Paso is a melting pot. Anything can happen. When chaos knocks on your door you can either embrace it or run from it.”
Listen to our exclusive advance stream of Know//Suffer’s The Great Dying below:
Know//Suffer’s The Great Dying comes out Friday, July 30th, and is available for preorder.
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Words by Chris Krovatin
