It began with a question between old friends, asked just before a flight—“hey, let me track vocals”—and an answer that changed things: “okay, let’s go now.” From that almost accidental moment in 2018, rotting in dirt clawed its way from scattered metal demos to a 2022 EP, then a 2023 Zegema Beach Fest performance, and now Anabiosis—a new release that sounds like it tore itself out of something bigger and worse.
There’s a reason the record feels feral. It’s because it is. Lark, the band’s vocalist and lyricist, set out with a prompt: to channel emotions through the lens of imagined “bestial deities.” The result is a dissonant, ferocious, and often painful emotional geography—grief reimagined as a god, rage as a deer spirit, alienation as evolutionary camouflage. Even the process was messy: after recording the instrumentals post-split with The Holy Ghost Tabernacle Choir, personal upheaval and writer’s block stalled the project until the end of 2024. The delay only seemed to ferment it further.
Across the EP, the band folds screamo, sludge, death metal and noise into a body that moves fast and tears itself apart just as quickly. The North Carolina five-piece shares common ground musically but with jagged angles: Jacob leans into chaotic sludge, Adam brings in metalcore and death metal, Joey and Chris hold it together on bass and drums, and Lark—who names herself “the screamo and noise girl”—lets her vocals carry the weight of what the rest of the band makes possible.
The lyrical drive of Anabiosis draws blood from a single cut: trying to live inside a world that makes you feel monstrous just for existing. “Doe eyes” channels trans rage as a deer spirit devouring blades and vomiting them back as vengeance. “Magpie” builds an image of a glitter-crazed god made of capitalist scrap and shattered followers. “Mock viper,” the most sonically brutal track, carries lyrics about tenderness and queer love, a conceptual contradiction that bleeds irony and heart. “Lamb” collapses into dread and emotional erasure—being the “means to every end,” but never the end itself.
The whole EP is a maze of fear, anger, care, shame, collapse, and resilience—twisting through unstable tempo changes and terrifying sonic landscapes. Rotting in dirt built a creature that bites, wails, softens, then bites again.
They’re part of a regional scene that’s growing strange and strong—North Carolina acts like Glamour World, Old Suns, And I Become Death, Clout Funeral, Process // Sleep, Demiurge, Craig Miller & The Killer Lites, Skin You Alive, Demonize, Serrate, Fliora, and Wide Open Wound forming a long, tangled root system.
Anabiosis is a partial return, half-dead and fully alert. It breathes, even if it shouldn’t.
Read the full track-by-track commentary below.
“doe eyes” is a song about trans rage in the face of a world that seems to become crueler and more dangerous by the day. It channels that rage into the image of a transgender deer spirit that devours blades to later regurgitate them and exact revenge on its enemies.
“magpie” reforms the modern American image of the Judeo-Christian god into a wealth-hoarding bird king, crafting its den from a vast collection of shimmering trinkets and broken followers.
“mock viper” is an outlier as far as my process is concerned — I wrote the lyrics specifically based on the recorded instrumentals (when I usually write longer pieces and rework them to fit a song that I think would fit). The mock viper appears venomous as an evolutionary defense mechanism, but is otherwise harmless to humans.
Queer people are demonized by society as something insidious, something to be feared and ostracized, but we just want to survive and thrive, to love and be loved, and at the end of the day, that’s really what this song is. I thought it would be fun to add to the “conceptual contradictions” by pairing one of the most chaotic and aggressive tracks on the EP with lyrics that are rooted in tenderness and intimacy. In essence, it’s a gay love song, I guess.
“lamb” is a song about oneself being the “means to every end” and the perpetual sense of dread that permeates a life lived that way. I wrote it while feeling like my life, my emotions, my needs were permanently occupying the proverbial back-burner, all the while holding an overwhelming burden of responsibility for all things outside of myself. For lack of better words, I felt a bit like a lamb waiting for the slaughter — seemingly helpless to my own life situation, too weak or pathetic to actually grab hold of my own wants and needs, forever waiting for an inevitable “end.”
View this post on Instagram
