Chain Cult Harm Reduction

Released
27th September 2024
Format

12 Inch

Black

£18.00

‘If you’re not enraged, You should dig some more, Never take for granted what people fought for years before, Death is certain, life is not’ (Harrowing Times)

Chain Cult will always hold something of a special place in my heart, playing as they did the first live show that I saw coming out of the various Covid lockdowns, with Subdued and The Annihilated at the Moth Club in April 2022.  Those periods of lockdown now seem a memory more distant than the actual passage of time should allow.  But what does remain very fresh in my mind is the joy of returning to live music – the pleasures of communal participation and the sheer sensory vitality that had been so missed.  And the Athens trio were a perfect fit for such a return, their darkly evocative post-punk inducing a sense of melancholic trepidation and defiant hope in equal measure.

Harm Reduction is the band’s second full-length, following on from 2019’s Shallow Grave, and the band continue to conjure tightly honed, mournfully euphoric anthems.  The key to the band’s sound has always been its surging synchronicity.  The powerfully sonorous rhythm section provides the lock-step groundwork for the smouldering guitar, while passionately strident vocals dissect the bleakness of our current predicament and, without collective action, even more desolate future. The album’s immersive virtues are, perhaps, perfectly encapsulated by the utterly infectious opener What We Leave Behind and the urgent forewarnings of Harrowing Times.

—Foundation Vinyl