TEETH – The Will of Hate
Release Date: 30th August 2024
Label: Translation Loss Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Death Metal, Dissonant Death Metal.
FFO: Nightmarer, Haunter, Ulcerate, Defacement.
Review By: Eric Wilt
Dissonant death metal is a challenging genre filled with bands whose goal is to create music that is ugly, claustrophobic, and menacing. Their aim is not to bring comfort through their songs, but rather, to make the listener feel ill at ease and oppressed. Still, there are more and more dissonant death metal bands popping up each year, so we metal heads must dig what the genre is offering. I, for one, love the challenge that dissonant death metal brings, and one of the most challenging yet enjoyable bands playing the style is Los Angeles’s Teeth. No newbies to the genre, Teeth will release The Will of Hate, the bands sixth album of any kind (including splits, EPs, and full lengths), on 30 August.
Instead of picking up where they left off with their previous album, Finite, Teeth made a conscious decision to have their compositions be more “focused and pointed.” Vocalist/guitarist, Erol Ulug stated that, “What is different this time around, both musically and lyrically, is that we made an effort to distill and focus our ideas and to be more conscious of larger scale form/song structure.” To this end, Teeth has written songs like Prison, a 2:54 second song that gets straight to the point of aurally devastating the listener. Capped off by an emotive solo, the song exemplifies Teeth’s desire to stay focused throughout. A few tracks later, the song Writhe shows how Teeth can make a song challenging in its dissonance without sacrificing groove. While the ninth track, Churn, sees the band beginning with a bludgeoning death metal riff that leads effortlessly into the blast-beat laden chaos of the verse before later moving back to the tremolo picked opening riff.
With The Will of Hate, Teeth has made an album that is as rewarding as it is challenging, especially upon repeat listens where nuances of songs are made clearer through familiarity. Dissonant death metal may not be intended to be pleasant, but there is beauty in the ugliness, and The Will of Hate is full of ugly-beautiful moments that listeners, if they are so inclined, will find poignant as they are revealed.
(4.5 / 5)
