If there’s one thing you know going into a Full of Hell record, it’s that the bar has been set high for extremity. As one of the most formidable extreme metal outfits out there, the band has consistently been the standard bearers for putrid, gnarly extremity for the better part of 15 years. Scraping The Divine is no different. Not content with 2024 only seeing the release of their newest reinvention Coagulated Bliss, they have joined forces with industrial artist Andrew Nolan, among other collaborators, to bring a new seething mass into the world.
Opening track ‘Gradual Timeslip’, featuring Nagura Taichi, features feral vocals over a cyborg instrumental, familiar industrial metal infested with cybernetic enhancements. Through the smoldering ruins, melody claws its way out for a brief minute of air, before being dragged back in kicking and screaming. ‘Heat Death From the Pyre’ follows, one of two tracks to feature GxCx. The track is manic and unrestrained, like a derailed train crashing headlong into the mouth of hell. Its structure is metamorphic, taking on different forms as it goes – never stagnating as each segment takes on different approaches to melody and unapologetic sludginess.
‘Burdened by Solar Mass’ opens on a disconcerting guitar wail before drums and vocals rip it off of its hinges. Throughout is a pervasive sense of doom and discomfort – it’s a deeply worrying sonic landscape that they very quickly establish. The track crashes into an electronic breakdown that marches with cataclysmic weight.
‘Sphere of Saturn’ features JK Flesh, the experimental project of legend Justin Broadrick of Godflesh, Jesu and previously Napalm Death. Whilst this collaboration might have you expecting an obvious heaviness, the track is a droning movement carried by slinking bass and twitchy drums, drifting like a satellite held by a fragile orbit. Guitars whir in and out like frequencies being lost in transmission, and it gives the track a palpable tension. It’s as close as a band like Full of Hell will come to an equivalent of Black Sabbath’s ‘Planet Caravan.’ Where that song feels like floating off into space, ‘Sphere of Saturn’ sounds as though you could crash back down to Earth at any moment.
‘Hemlock Gnosis’, featuring Intensive Care, is uncomfortably close. Giving you no room to breathe, the track is pensive and considered, offering mere tastes of the heaviness present elsewhere. Still, it’s harrowing. ‘Blessed Anathema’ takes a dystopian chord progression and drags it through the gutter, coating it in dense swathes of filth and grime. The siren-esque sounds that surround embellish the apocalyptic feel even further and build the tension that is paid off in the following track. ‘Facing the Divide’ is the second track to feature GxCx, and it falls further down the dismal well set up by the previous two songs. The siren sounds persist, now wailing, desperate synths. Hypodermic noise needles burrow into your skull and guttural vocals cry out like the anguished yelps of a swamp creature. The track builds to an outburst of all-consuming noise that falls away just before the closing seconds.
‘Approaching the Monolith’ is a straight up noise/grind track that is violently acidic from its opening scream, letting up only when it’s done inflicting grievous bodily harm. ‘Extinguished Glow is a slow wander through a cyberpunk slum, languishing in its own toxic fumes. ‘Common Miracles’ has a sinister death squad march to it. All across the album are moments of sheer disgusting extremity in a series of short bursts.
While I won’t pretend this is an essential Full of Hell work, they’re a band that never fails to be interesting. Sure, Scraping the Divine might struggle to arrest your attention from more prominent or interesting works and collaborations, the quality of the slower, more cinematic tracks here make it worth your time. It’s an album that sees the band and Andrew Nolan run a bath of nuclear waste and asbestos and roll in it for 35 minutes along with their collaborators. Not a “stop what you’re doing and go listen record” but if you’re into extreme metal, noise or experimental music and aren’t checking out whatever Full of Hell do next, you’re a fool.
Full of Hell + Andrew Nolan: Scraping the Devine – Out now (Closed Casket Activities)
