Private Hell don’t ease into anything here. The Richmond band frame their upcoming 7” “To Dust You Shall Return” around a year that pushed them from every side — personal, political, and whatever sits between those two when the world won’t stop burning.
The record lands today, self-released, a continuation of the stripped-down direction they stumbled into when they tracked “Wake Up Screaming” as a three-piece.
That flexi felt like the moment they caught the version of themselves they’d been trying to reach since the start. As they put it, after finishing those songs, “we felt like we had really found the sound that we had been searching for since the inception of the band.”
Writing for the new EP kicked off right after that late-2024 flexi. Cutting the lineup to three forced them into something leaner, heavier, and a bit primitive — not intentionally raw, just unfiltered.
The new stuff stretches that thread further, pulling from the things they grew up on: 80s American hardcore, UK crust’s collapse-of-civilization riffing, Swedish death metal’s chainsaw edge, New York hardcore’s stomp, and the off-the-rails sprint of German thrash.
Local gravity matters too; Richmond’s current wave — Public Acid, Division of Mind, Destruct, Killing Pace — kept raising the bar in their periphery. And for the closing track, they brought in JK, violinist and long-time Richmond show-runner, described simply as “THE go-to person for punk and metal shows in Richmond… a brilliant musician.” His part slips into the record’s mood without calling attention to itself.
The EP’s spine is the search for hope in a world that doesn’t give much of it up. MK didn’t set out to write a thematic cycle, but the last five years kept circling the same internal question: what exactly does a person hold onto when the future looks like a coin toss and humanity seems determined to eat itself? These songs are different angles on that same quiet panic.
The first lines of “Future Void” — “A History of a world filled with malice. We die alone. Good men whose flesh grows cold” — were the earliest lyrics written for the EP. MK ties the track to seeing Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron,” and the documentary about its making, right around the time his father died.
He talks about the film’s sense of precarious balance, the idea that the world is “just a gust of wind away from everything falling apart.” That landed hard when paired with the constant drumbeat of “continuing genocides, the ever present threat of war, the stripping away of human rights, and lack of signs of a better tomorrow.”
As he puts it, the song reaches into the most cynical parts of his head — the part that wonders if maybe mankind already sealed its fate.
“Demon in a Bottle” pivots inward. MK pulled the title from a late-70s Iron Man run, using it as a shorthand for the cycle of sobriety and relapse.
The core lines — “I would sell my soul just to quench my thirst. I would risk it all just to lift this cure” — break down the everyday grind of fighting off old habits and whatever internal stuff tries to drag you back under. He sees the song as bigger than his own sobriety though; it’s about the forces people end up chained to, and the stubborn belief that self-improvement matters at all. Writing it felt like saying out loud that hope isn’t passive — it costs something.
“Misanthropic Urge” answers the record’s darker corners with a different kind of restlessness. The lyric “Cling to hope to stay alive. Don’t let them kill the fire inside” is MK talking back to himself from a slightly less bleak vantage point. He knows nihilism is the easy slide — global warming, war, political decay, all the reasons someone might shrug and stop bothering. But he refuses to sink into that resignation.
The “fire inside” nods to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” where “carrying the fire” becomes the only moral compass left in a dead world. For MK, that fire isn’t blind optimism; it’s the bare-minimum spark required to keep fighting without pretending things are fine.
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The EP closes with “Charred Remains of a Dying Star,” the record’s most outward-aimed track. MK wrote it from a mix of fear and anger over the speed at which artificial intelligence has crept into every corner of daily life. He’s blunt about it: the rapid growth of these systems signals “a real value rising on technology that dampens our collective humanity.”
The song threads in references to the “Dune” series, especially the “Butlerian Jihad,” using it less as prophecy and more as a warning about the cost of outsourcing human experience to “thinking machines.” He isn’t forecasting apocalypse, but he’s wary of a future where art, education, and labor hollow out under tech that prioritizes efficiency over people.
The line “Anger is an energy. Fight the True Enemy” closes the record — the first half borrowed from Public Image Ltd., the second aimed at the capitalist forces he sees steering the narrative for their own gain.
Photo by Chelse Warre
Private Hell are just not soft-pedaling the parts that already feel bleak. “To Dust You Shall Return” reads like someone trying to keep a small flame alive while acknowledging that the wind isn’t letting up. Some quotes land like confession, others like field notes from a year that didn’t leave much room to breathe.
The story underneath is simple: hope is hard to come by, but it’s still a choice someone has to make, even when the world keeps nudging them the other way.
