While “From Day 0 Forward”, the debut EP from Detroit based WOUNDED TOUCH is fairly devastating in its sonic scope, it also provides a more nuanced look at metallic hardcore and metalcore genre. The offering makes for an exhilarating first listen, and we’re pleased to give you an insightful look into its lyrical content through the first hand track by track commentary below!
“Day zero is what I refer to as the moment a person has to start their life over, after losing everything or everyone they know and having to almost literally begin again following a significant loss or tragedy, and the life that is to come from then on,” explains vocalist Nick Holland
From Day 0 Forward is out now via Smartpunk Records! WOUNDED TOUCH features members of Sunlight’s Bane, And Hell Followed With, and Steamroller.
“The songs all covered various stages of survival and self-care, beginning with what I refer to as day zero, the moment the life you knew and had been living ended, the first day that the new life you didn’t choose started,” describes Holland.
Across a clipped running time, the quintet plots a survival plan in the wake of broken families ruptured by divorce and dishonesty, while letting trauma and suffering be a thunderous power source. Their metalcore is abrupt (“Memories Like Shrapnel”) and vicious (“A Hell I No Longer Deserve”), but it’s primed for the pressure points triggered when suffering takes center stage. Rock ‘n Load magazine
1. “Memories Like Shrapnel”
This song lyrically is about the exact moment a loss occurs and the metaphorical similarity of it to experiencing shell shock. It’s about the moment you are swept up in the process of loss and grief, comparing the reoccurring pain of the experience to pieces of shrapnel embedded in the body from the emotional shellshock becoming infected, twisted. The line “I’ll wear the knives, I’ll wear the arrows” is accepting the blades someone buried in your back as a marking of your own failure, something you will in return carry with you for the rest of your life (which we erroneously do at the occurrence of such things).
2. “Sincerely, Garroted”
As the subject matter of the EP continues to cover the topic of grief and loss, Sincerely Garroted is about accepting your own failings and the hopelessness of such a moment, and choosing to either metaphorically or literally lay down and die. The song is comparing the day to day struggle of life and hardship to warfare, one that a person chooses to no longer wage. The last line “I can fight this war no longer” the summation of the song’s message.
3. “Excision”
This song is about the point in the rebuilding of my life following a devastating loss where I finally accepted that not only was I not the one to blame for the way things occurred, but that I wanted to survive. I wanted to remove the toxic dependence and weakness in myself towards the memory of a toxic person and work towards moving forward and surviving. The song is about looking at the act of survival as a revenge, by choosing to survive someone’s maliciousness simply out of spite, if only to allow a hatred for them to survive. The song parallels the metaphor of the removal of a cancerous teratoma from the body in surgery, thus the song’s title.
The first single is “Excision,” an absolutely filthy dose of sludgy metallic hardcore that you might not be expecting if you’re coming to Wounded Touch by the way of The Swellers. Fans of Converge and early Cave In should probably take note too. / BrooklynVegan
4. “A Hell I No Longer Deserve”
The lyrics to this song continue the latter half of the EP’s subject about the acceptance of circumstance and the willful choice to repair and survive, comparing this to a long and painful climb out of Hell itself. It is about the moment one can reflect on a disparaging memory and with confidence state “I did not deserve this.”
5. “My Fractured Path”
The beginning of a new life can be a terrifying undertaking. The scars, the memories, all the remnants of our past life reminding us along the way of the pain endured. But as a survivor, as a fracture of that past self, this song is about the final step off of the painful path of broken glass I took and the first step onto a new path, a new life that I may not have asked for, but would face without fear.
