There’s still something in the waters in America’s Pacific Northwest. Sure, it might be the excessive amounts of lead from decades of industrial wreckage (which would certainly account for all the serial killers), but on fourth album Impossible World, Seattle punks Filth is Eternal are determined to show that there’s still a lot of grit and grime, too. Filth, if you will. On their previous outing, 2023’s Find Out, the band began to work in melodies and fuzzed-out riffs that wouldn’t have sounded out of place at a show at Seattle’s legendary Off Ramp circa 1989, with vocalist Lis Di Angelo’s vocals moving from a hardcore bark to something a little more nuanced, and, well, grungey.
Now we’re a few years removed, and from the opening bars of lead single and opening track ‘Stay Melted’, it’s clear that sound has devolved even further. The snarling fuzz of buzzsaw guitars is met with a vocal that hews closer to the sneer of Kim Gordon than the roar of Brody Dalle, with a half-hushed, half-growled opening of “people give what they need/a slow blade/you take a photograph/feels like an epitaph” speaking to the sense of enraged ennui that permeates the whole album. Hell, maybe that epitaph should be capitalised. By the time Lis growls “really wanna say I felt it” over a hook that feels delivered from on high, you’ve got a pretty solid idea of where we’re going. And the answer is… well, it’s still the Off Ramp, but maybe a few years down the line.
Which is not to say that Filth Is Eternal have left their hardcore roots behind. Sure, Brian McClelland’s guitars may sound like they may have been wrested right out of Mark Arm’s amplifiers, but Josh Pehrson’s drums and Logan Miller’s low end are thunderous in a way that feels much closer to Ben Koller and Nate Newton’s tumultuous groove. Taken together, it creates a sonic wreckage that calls to mind Philadelphia’s Blacklisted at their best.
All of which would be meaningless without the songs to back it up, and here Filth Is Eternal continue to have hooks the whole live-long day. What’s new and refreshing this time around is how they’re constantly undercut by the more withdrawn vocal style. By the time Lis builds up to howling “live in the night forever, burn like hellfire forever” at the climax of third track ‘Hellfire’, you can’t help but pump your fist in the air, because it’s felt earned by all the restraint that led up to it.
When they then crack into the much harder ‘Acetylene’, those hardcore growls start to assert themselves even more, and the album picks up into an energy that feeds off the urgency of Pehrson’s increasingly relentless drumming. That pace continues right up until closing track ‘Skorpio’, with its more downbeat refrain of “grey skies/how are you feeling/beneath the overpass/flowers in bloom’”feeling like a pretty clear callback to Washington’s most famous sons.
As with Find Out, there’s not an ounce of fat to be found here, with Impossible World’s twelve songs flashing by in thirty minutes that can’t help but feel scant. You’d be hard pushed to find any wheels being re-invented here, but that almost feels the point, somehow. Everything about this album seems rooted in the past, from the Seattle grime of the production to the polemically poetic lyrics that conjure the ’90s post-hardcore bloom, and finally to the sense of optimism that, eventually, becomes the overriding feeling that the album leaves in its wake. It all feels intentional, rather than derivative. Remember that? Hope?
It’s also, it has to be said, a hell of a lot of fun. Sure, these are songs about survival, humanity, and resistance, but they’re delivered with so much energy, so much vibrancy, you can’t help but smile along. They’re going to sound incredible in a bar, but they’d carry over a festival field too.
Like fellow hardcore stalwarts-turned-mainstream botherers Code Orange before them, everything surrounding this album — from that MTV2-aping video for ‘Stay Melted’ to their whole Insta/gig poster aesthetic — calls back to a desire to be out of this time, to be back in a world where the Super Fuzz pedal ruled the world. The difference is that with Impossible World, those aesthetics don’t feel like window dressing. They feel part of an honest evolution of a band that suddenly sounds like both the past and the future.