‘We slouch on our thrones, Etched in stone, Last breaths screaming, A nocturne of apathy’ (The Emptiness Of All Things)

‘It is about not giving up the ghost – and this can sometimes amount to the same thing – the refusal of the ghost to give up on us’ (Mark Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life).  The concept of hauntology has long informed the music of Massa Nera (Black Mass) – the refusal to settle for the financialised hegemony of our times, not to take refuge in the melancholy of nostalgia, but rather to animate the understanding that alternative futures can be born.

It is once again a powerful presence in shaping The Emptiness Of All Things, one that examines the neoliberal ‘common sense’ that locks us into a cycle of growing inequality, entrenched militarisation, climatic breakdown, and technological delusion.  Indeed, the title itself is an allusion to the fact that what seems eternal is, in fact, contingent on our collective acceptance.

The Emptiness Of All Things is the New Jersey band’s third full-length and follow-up to last year’s split album with Quiet Fear, Quatro Vientos // Cincos Soles (Four Winds, Five Suns). At the heart of their searingly intense emotional hardcore is an exploration of the tensions between discordant fury and dissonant reflection, barely restrained chaos and rigorous atmospheric restraint, and the textures that bridge these competing dynamics.

And from the savagely percussive opening of A Body, this tension produces a truly visceral onslaught that roils restlessly, and rarely as anticipated, between harsh aggression and haunting melody.  The frantic incantation of ‘I’ll save us’ during Pèlerin (Pilgrim).  The fiercely rhythmic escalation of Mechanical Sunrise.  The bleakly pulsing industrial climax to Lavender.  The spectral meditation of the closing New Animism.  Massa Nera have harnessed their sonic experimentation, narrative exposition, and no little black humour (‘We’ll cruise the streets in electric cars, with the wind in our hair’ [Mechanical Sunrise]), to deliver an album of strikingly realised ambition.