‘The following songs are about a lifetime of making myself vomit. They are about the lies I tell myself and the reality of what bulimia nervosa has done to my mind and body. They are about the havoc that my disease has wrought on my personal relationships and the pain it has caused the ones unfortunate enough to love me. I want to change. I want to want to change. I don’t know if I ever will, and I am so sorry.’ (Michael Berdan, Uniform taken from his essay in The Quietus, 24^th July 2024)

Uniform’s progression across their earlier four stand alone albums had been one of almost incremental refinement from the raw industrial eruption of their 2015 debut Perfect World to 2020’s more darkly anthemic Shame.  In many respects, American Standard feels like an altogether more dramatic evolution.  All of the band’s defining characteristics – harshly infectious vocals, punishing percussion, and doom-infused riffage – are present and correct.  Yet, it is as if they have been distilled back to their very essence and then reshaped into new, even more inventive forms.

The album’s title, American Standard, refers to the commonplace US sanitaryware company, the logo of which has become seared into vocalist Michael Berdan’s mind through suffering bulimia, a terrible struggle that forms the narrative to the entire album.  He collaborated with two novelists he admires, Maggie Siebert and B.R. Yeager, to hone the lyrics and ensure that he did not hold back in exploring the horror of experiences that he understandably feels uncomfortable relating.  It is a thoroughly harrowing journey.

The album’s four tracks span a run time of some 40 minutes, with the title track enveloping the entirety of Side One.  It opens with call-and-repeat shouting – ‘A part of me, But it can’t be me, It can’t, Oh God it can’t’ – before plunging us into the maelstrom.  Swells of mournful guitar form a recurring motif throughout, flaring through unremitting waves of droning metallic guitars, before building to a cathartic crescendo that viscerally blends melody and pain, ‘My throat is raw, Muscles sore, I am sweat, I am filth, And I am failure’.  Such is the band’s skill in layering and building momentum that not for a moment does the track lose any of its relentless intensity.

Side Two opens with This Is Not A Prayer, a track of staccato brutality built around furiously propulsive percussion and shards of thunderous riffage that are in turn shrouded in flourishes of bleak melodicism as the song builds to its fierce closing incantation, ‘This is not a prayer, (I’ve got a wish)…Please don’t forget me, (This is not a prayer)’.  The sludge-fuelled Clemency follows, and its claustrophobic heaviness allows no respite (‘You can’t begin to take back, What you have already done’), before galloping guitars joust with gothic-tinged electronics as Permanent Embrace (‘And you found, Found my love appalling’) brings the album to a poignant finale.

How draining, how exposing, how necessary an experience it must have been for Berdan to reveal such inner torment, is hard to comprehend.  But there can be no doubt that the band have collectively risen to the challenge.  American Standard unashamedly reflects, and demonstrably justifies, this courage.