Twenty years into putting on shows and playing in Belgian punk and hardcore crews, the four people who became Wrvng looked around, found the same amount of anger sitting in everyone, and decided the moment called for it. “Spectacle of Fear” is the first piece of what came out of that, premiering on Spotify today ahead of debut EP “Slow Motion Ruins“.
The lineup overlaps two ex-band histories. Vocalist Bert and bassist Tijs played together in Sundays; Bert also spent time in Static Vision, which is still going, though nobody else from Wrvng is involved with it. Drummer Thomas (Masn) and guitarist Krulle played together in Heaver.
“Everyone being active in punk and hardcore, putting up shows and playing in bands for more than 20 years. The time was right, and we all had the same amount of anger inside us to start WRVNG and write these fast, aggressive songs. The climate and the times we live in just asked for it,” Bert says.
The name they almost had was Wrang. That changed when they went to upload the first song to Spotify and found out a Dutch black metal band already had it. “We didn’t want to take any risk having the same band name, so we decided to change it to WRVNG (still WRANG, but a little more chaotic),” Bert explains. The V replacing the A reads like the band’s first stylistic choice: same name, more chaotic.
Across “Slow Motion Ruins” the lyrics keep returning to one continuous failure from different angles, all of them political. “The air in this world is thick with a kind of manufactured silence. We’re told everything is fine while so many things are rotting under our feet. ‘Slow Motion Ruins’ is our attempt to break that silence. It’s not just a collection of songs; it’s like some kind of roadmap of the collapse we’re all pretending isn’t happening,” Bert says.
“Borderless Violence” turns on the screen-mediated way modern war gets sold. “We’re sick of the ‘clean’ way war is sold to us. We live in a culture where death is a data point on a screen and responsibility is stretched across oceans until it disappears. We wanted to capture that cold, mechanical indifference, the hovering drone that doesn’t care about your borders or your humanity. If you can sit in comfort while a small gesture on a screen ends a thousand lives, you aren’t a witness. You’re a participant.”
“Democracy for Sale” and “Lawless Superpower” sit in the same room of rage. “These come from the pure rage of being lied to. We’re tired of the theatrical version of freedom. We see the architects of justice breaking their own rules while they preach accountability to the rest of us. We wrote these songs to strip away the costume of legitimacy. If the law is only a tool for the powerful, then the law is just another weapon. We’re just calling it what it is.”
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“Spectacle of Fear“, the song going up today, names the mechanism that holds the rest of the EP together. “We spend our lives vibrating with a fear we didn’t ask for. ‘Spectacle of Fear’ is about the manufacturing of that urgency, the way the screens keep us too busy bracing for impact to notice who’s actually steering the ship.”
“Failed State at Home” then pulls the lens back to street level. “A failed state doesn’t always look like a war zone, sometimes it looks like a town that has simply given up. It’s the slow-motion disaster of normalized decay. It’s the wound we’ve stopped trying to heal because we’ve started believing it’s just part of our bodies.”
Bert closes that thread without softening it: “Words can not express the hate and disgust we have towards injustice and fascism and we want to make this clear from the start.”
The lyrics came out of a specific reading stack. Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” and Giuliano Da Empoli’s “The Hour of the Predator” both landed while Bert was writing.
The non-literary ingredient was the gap between daily life and headlines: “the daily overload on information we get and the small things we worry about in our daily lives that stand in great contrast with all big things happening beyond our control. It just feels so absurd and the songs are a way to get these frustrations out of my system.” On the visual side, Banksy.
Musically they point to COA, Verse, old Raised Fist, and Cokebust. The tracks were recorded at home across several months, with Thomas handling tracking, mixing, and mastering himself. No outside studio, no outside engineer.
The labels came together through the band’s own contacts. They sent the EP out cold to a few places. Andrius from Pasidaryk Pats Records in Lithuania got back saying he wanted to figure out how to work together, then passed the recording on to a couple of befriended labels he trusted. That’s how Vina Records (Italy) and Hecatombe Records (Spain) got on board, all without a manager or booking agent in the middle.
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After “Slow Motion Ruins” is out, the plan is to play as much as possible, including outside Belgium. “Local is just a word, if we’re far away from home we feel local as well,” Bert says. They also flagged a list of Belgian bands they’d want anyone reading this to look at in parallel: We Came As Dirt, Clusterfuct, Colรจre, Rรถt Stewart, Bezette Stad, No Prisoners, and Eastwood.
“Spectacle of Fear” is out today on Spotify. “Slow Motion Ruins” follows on Pasidaryk Pats Records, Vina Records, and Hecatombe Records.
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