Bound By Modern Age Records just dropped The Machine Demands Blood by UK-based vegan straight edge band xapothecaryx, a co-release handled alongside Betrayed by Life (UK), Contraband (USA), and xConvictionx Records (Philippines). The EP was recorded at Tidalwave Recordings and mixed and mastered by Scott Crouse (Form IV Audio).
Its arrival is marked by a European tour and the single Xenograft, out April 18. The full release follows on May 2.
The core message is clear from the start: The Machine Demands Blood refers to the pervasive machinery of violence—military, state, capitalist, and industrial—that fuels suffering and death.
The band explains that the title is drawn from the final statement of Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. serviceman who self-immolated to protest the genocide in Palestine: “But the machine demands blood. None of this is fair.” This concept threads through all five songs with surgical intent.
Artwork for both the single and EP comes from @julia_ceasarsalad. There’s a clear visual and ideological consistency running through the entire release: violent structures laid bare, whether political, industrial, or personal.
The Machine Demands Blood does not offer relief. It offers witness.
Here’s the full track by track runndown.
The Machine Demands Blood
It was important to lead with the title track of the EP, it sets the tone for the rest of the tracks; to meet violence with violence, especially oppressive violence against innocence.
‘Death to the West and those who oppress’ is self-explanatory, for too long has the West inserted itself in conflicts across the globe that does not concern it.
The Machine Demands Blood is also a two-fold statement in that it also refers to the animal agriculture machine. A machine that systematically churns out slaughtered beings in the name of sustenance. Something that is archaic when modern forms of sustenance exist, it is damaging, brutal and polluting to nature’s way of life.
Xenograft
I originally read about the term ‘xenotransplant’ in an article referring to an operation in which a pigs’ kidney was used to replace a human male’s kidney.
Of course, the body rejected the animal’s kidney, and both involved died.
Xenograft is a synonym for xenotransplant; the track is about the defilement of animals in the name of animal experimentation.
‘Playing god with no respect’ is essentially the crux of the track, taking the lives and defiling the lives of these creatures without consent. To ‘xenograft this blade within’ refers to those that are committing these heinous acts to put the pain upon themselves and ultimately take their own lives.
Empyrean
Empyrean is the higher echelon of heaven, the top of divinity.
This is a metaphor for the 1% in our world, the wealthiest people, those that are considered royalty, and those that are so well connected that they can stay hidden from society.
This is how they view themselves, as untouchable and perfection. ‘Eviscerate the empyrean’ refers to how we should take justice into our own hands and remove these people from our society.
Putridity
Putridity is written from the perspective of an animal in the slaughterhouse. How they are taken from their family, and subject to torture as their lives are taken for the greed of humanity.
It is about the irony and hypocrisy of mankind treating their own with such high regard and considering all human life equal in the name of science, how mankind ‘puts down’ animals who are injured or considered to have no purpose.
‘Why care for iron lungs?’ points out this hypocrisy, and how humans do have the empathy to care for those who cannot care for themselves.
Laid Riven
To be laid riven is to stay divided, and this divide is between those with an addiction and those without. The grace of god lays divided between people, some are able to overcome addiction yet others are drawn to it.
Nature will reclaim those that succumb to their addictions and try to evolve until it does not happen again.
This track talks about this divide, and how those that claim edge do not rely on substances to get through life, rather they face their problems head on.
