Not many bands can play this hard and still make it stick melodically. Daggers have been at this long enough to know the difference — the kind of band that’s eaten from more than one table, and it shows. “El Mundo Kaput” hits like rock’n’roll hardcore with a southern undertow: chaotic, harsh, but with hooks that don’t ask permission. Three songs, and the whole thing moves.
The 7″ is out today digitally, with vinyl following April 1st on Shield Recordings (SLD165). Tracked and mixed live by Gilles Demolder — who’s worked with Oathbreaker and Wiegedood — at Jetson Studio in Kortrijk, mastered by Adrien Schockert in Brussels.
The band positions the EP as a pull back toward their core after one EP and two albums spent moving outward: “We’re going back to the roots of Daggers: fast, and raw, with an experimental edge.” Working live was about more than sound — “Recording live allows us to better capture the energy of the songs and the chemistry we share as a band” — and going with Demolder made it easier: “We immediately felt at home.”
Lead single “With Rue” dropped March 4th with a video, and the band’s own read on it is blunt: “Probably the most metal track we’ve ever written, and also one of the most brutal.” Its lyrics run through images of violence as spectacle — “fire as a trick,” “crops fail fields burn” — delivered with what Daggers describe as the haste and anger of a thousand rusty swords, their crust-infused blend of punk and metal at its most hypnotic and claustrophobic.
The video was directed by guitarist Thierry Tönnes, who also built the artwork. Both came from the same place: do as little post-processing as possible.
The cover was made with oil pastels and a photocopy machine, no retouching. “All the elements were placed as they came out, untouched, straight onto the canvas. No clean-up, no fixing, just instinct.” The band calls the result “messy, loud, and alive” — which covers the EP too.
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Release show is April 1st at Magasin4 in Brussels with Habak. Then: Les Nuits Eclectiques in Marbehan on April 4th, Wham Jam Fest in Kortrijk on May 2nd, La Zone in Liège — their hometown — on May 9th with Bezette Stad and Vaag, AZ in Aachen on May 23rd, with more dates in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands still to come.
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A full-length is already in the works for next year, timed to their 20th anniversary, pushing further into what the band calls “dark, experimental hardcore territories.”
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