Aural Aggravation

Human Worth – 13th November 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

HR and managers will often say that work/life balance is important, and harp on about how they, and the company, value their ‘colleagues’, their most important commodity. They’ll say it, but their actions will demonstrate that it’s a massive lie. They don’t give a shit. Employees are expendable, and if you don’t like the conditions, there’s always another sucker desperate enough to put up with them in order to keep a roof over their head. It’s not simply that they as individuals, or as a company, don’t give a shit: capitalism doesn’t give a shit. In fact, the system is purely one of exploitation, where those at the top – not just CEOs, but major shareholders, which include pension funds – seek to extract maximum profit at any cost. This is why the majority of benefits claimants in the UK are actually in employment, and why so many professionals in full-time jobs are dependent on food-banks just to survive. Capitalism actually demands that the workers do work themselves to the bone: as a consequence, they’re too busy – and too exhausted – just staying alive to push back, to seek change.

On Work Yourself to the Bone, Black Groove capture the soul-crushing experience of the daily grind, where there is no hope of a better life, because simply existing saps every ounce of strength. From the opening track – lead single cut, ‘Mutton’, they plough into a deep trough of sludgy dirges, and going in slow and heavy with a six-and-a-half-minute punisher makes for a strong start which sets the tone – and tempo – for the album. The vocals are shared between bassist Gareth Hellings and guitarist Jake Packham, and each possesses a truly purgatorial scream, conveying the existential anguish of a living hell. It’s a full-on, gut-wrenchingly heavy doomfest, a veritable endurance test of a tune, and the reward for making your way through it is more of the same.

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What do you call a man with a penis in the middle of his face? Fuck nose. Boom boom. It’s also the title of the album’s second song, which brings a big-bollocked swaggering riff, played with a proper sense of groove. Then the pace slows… and slows… until it’s a crawl. It recreates the experience of the working week. How is it only Tuesday? How is it only 10:30am? Fuck nose… The weight increases as the riffing gets slower, and the extended solo is simply wild, and strangely fitting.

Things only get slower and heavier and more oppressive with the arrival of ‘Robert’s Johnson’, a sonic experience which is like being kicked in the ribs repeatedly with steel-toed boots. Only very slowly, at fifteen-second intervals. Of course, after six minutes of this punishment, you’re fucked.

At just a minute and a half, and sitting bang in the middle of the album, you could be forgiven for expecting ‘Little Jimmy’ would provide some respite from the heavy slog, but no: it’s every bit as much of a slow slugger, only shorter, before the piledriving ‘Sloggers’ lurches in. it’s pacier, landing between Mötörhead and Napalm Death and dominated by a bowel-loosening bass. In my twenty-eight years of corporate drudgery, my bowels became my friend, as I would on occasion sit, basking in a few moments away from the noise of the open-plan office floor, and entertain myself by calculating how much I was being paid to take a shit on company time, and considering the use of as much bog roll as I wished a minor act of rebellion. Yeah! Sticking it to the man! I might have liberated some stationery, too.

‘Looking Thin’ hits a new earth-shattering level of doomy droney gnarliness, but it’s merely a prelude to the album’s ten-minute finale, and the title – ‘Dave the Double Shift Slave’ speaks for itself. This is an absolute monster. And in its bludgeoning away for what feels like an eternity as that thick, slow, sludgy riff, over which the vocals scream in perpetual, torturous pain, it creates perfectly, through the medium of sound, the hell of long hours performing repetitious tasks.

We are all slaves to the grind, hamsters on the wheel of the capitalist machine, and with Work Yourself to the Bone, Black Groove deliver the purest aural articulation of the agony of dragging your sorry carcass through endless drudgery, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until you fucking die, just to eat, and just to make money for millionaires. It’s brutal, and unflinching, and expresses the deepest, most existential pain with a rare precision.

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