‘You won’t find us washing with the tides from crowd to faceless crowd, nor dreamless in the mills where years are ground to dust, You won’t find us between white walls, where the lights are always on’ (Gone To Croatan)

‘The darkness before the dawn, It just goes on and on’.   And so goes the savagely primordial howl that heralds the return of Catharsis on the opener Nocturne, a return that is as thoroughly welcome as it is entirely unexpected.  The catalyst was the ever-darkening turn in the US as it accelerates, seemingly without pause, towards authoritarianism.  The poisonous fruit of decades of entrenched socio-economic inequality and the relentless militarisation of civic society are being harvested by a demagogue and his gaggle of opportunists.  For Catharsis, this is a call that could not be ignored.

The band were initially active between 1994 and 2002, before reforming in 2012 to continue to tour in line with their fiercely DIY convictions, with members also being involved in a myriad of other projects, including Requiem, Sect, Trial, and Undying.  Hope Against Hope represents their first new material since 2001’s Arsonist’s Prayer.  Now, normally you could find yourself approaching fresh music after such a lengthy hiatus with trepidation as much as excitement.  Yet, such was the clarity of Catharsis’ musical vision and political conviction, it was hard for me to imagine them coming back as anything other than the Catharsis that so indelibly helped to shape my understanding of what hardcore can achieve.

My confidence was not misplaced.  Hope Against Hope succeeds both in dramatically progressing the band’s musical expression and also conveying a sense that they have never been away – this is simply the organic next step.  Bleakly menacing, structurally ambitious, crust-tinged metallic hardcore continues to form the searing crucible that enables the band to ferment a barrage of unwavering, visceral intensity.  It is one clearly crafted with intent and a characteristically arresting inventiveness.  From the swirling, haunting, almost operatic, backing vocals that unfurl throughout Power, and which are further braided through with solemn violin during Gone To Croatan, to the ominously whispered spoken word of Eremocene and the exuberant melodicism that flares during Last Words, the energy is utterly irrepressible.

Lyrically, the band continue to favour often overtly apocalyptic, darkly allusive imagery, to evoke the consequences of rampant economic exploitation and environmental extraction.  They call on a broadly anarchist framing to explore how alternatives can be realised to nurture a more egalitarian future for humanity.  At the very heart of the album is a tension around the concept of hope.  How is it possible to sustain hope, when there is so little evidence of anything going right?

No easy answers are proffered, but rather there is a recognition that hope is the essential counter to nihilism.  Indeed, the value of hope amplifies as conditions deteriorate and as the need to challenge the sickness increases.  It does not assure victory, but it fights to protect and promote the very idea of what is right.  It is, in fact, a prerequisite to resistance.  In the band’s own words from their 1999 full-length, Passion: ‘But the important thing is to speak, to act, to do something, and let the consequences sort themselves out.  So if we live, let’s live to tread on kings, to break our bodies and our hearts to keep ahead of death, to dance right through our lives’.