Aural Aggravation

Tartarus Records – 26th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

The mood which pervades all life right now, feels pretty bleak. It’s not only that turning on the news brings endless darkness, with endless reports of multiple wars and families around the globe, but it feels as if a cloud has descended over all existence for all but the mega-wealthy who are living it large, laughing their way around the globe on cruises and in private jets in the knowledge that they’ll be gone and interred in spectacular mausoleums or at least having secured their notes in history and with extensive entries on Wikipedia. My daughter, who’s twelve, and loves retailing me with facts, told me just last night that based on current consumption, oil supplies will be exhausted when she reaches the age of fifty-six. “I don’t want to live til I’m fifty-six,” she said. It wasn’t spoken with an air of pessimism of gloom, but a statement grounded in an acceptance of the hell that the future holds.

It’s in this context that we arrive at III, by extreme experimental duo All Are to Return, who preface their new album with the commentary that ‘We have entered a new age of extinction – of poisoned lands, habitat destruction and encompassing climate catastrophe. AATR III reflects the harshness of life laid bare to the vagaries of capital, of uncaring generations heaping misery on their successors and the life-forms with which they share a fragile biosphere.’

Something I find bewildering is that in the nineties, environmental issues were pretty niche, as was being vegetarian – you’d be hard-pressed to find vegetarian cheese or yucky TVP on the high street, and would only be able to score some half-edible veggie sausages in Holland and Barrett or some crustie hippie shop down some side-street. Now, this is mainstream, and yet still politicians back big businesses who push fracking and deforestation and place profits ahead of what most refer to as ‘sustainability’, but is, ultimately, in reality, ‘survival’.

Perhaps I digress a little, but feel it’s relevant before returning to the pitch which explains how ‘The album’s unmitigated brutality of sound and expression are mediation of these concurrent events. Colossal noise-scapes are shaped with pulsing synth patterns, shredding percussion and vocals that are screams from the void. As a whole, the many-layered compositions carry massive assaults on the senses and a rage unhuman.’

The first few seconds alone are an all-out sonic assault, a blast of harsh static noise, a howling white noise blizzard which hurts. And from thereon in, it only gets harsher, an obliterative wall of noise that goes full Merzbow in no time. It shivers and trembles, grates and vibrates, everything overloading, eardrum-shredding, abrasive, aggressive, snarling, gnarly.

Not everyone ‘gets’ noise: to many, it is just ‘noise’. But noise is a vehicle which provides a unique catharsis, a means of channelling rage which cannot be conveyed in words alone. There are vocals on III, but they’re the sound of demonic torture in a sea of flame.

Thunderous, speaker crackling distortion overloads, and the vocals are butt demented, demonic shrieks buried amidst a skin-stripping nuclear blast. Every track is harsher and louder and denser than the last – and it’s the perfect soundtrack to the world right now. It would equally be a perfect soundtrack to Threads, being pure white-noise, blinding apocalypse in sound.

‘Drift’ is entirely representative: a solid wall of noise, harder and heavier than a slab of concrete – and it is the perfect encapsulation of the rage of life in the now. I sat down to listen to this as Iran rained missiles down on Israel in retaliation for the bombing of their embassy in Syria… Israel immediately vowed to return fire. Gaza has been levelled. We’ve just endured the wettest – and warmest – February and March on record here in the UK and half the country is under water, and many places received the entire rainfall for April in the first week, since when we’ve had more frosts than in the previous two months. Around the globe, wars rage and famine is rife, and frankly, everything is fucked. To think otherwise is delusional. Legacy? It’s clear what the legacy of the 21st Century will be, and ‘Legacy’ encapsulates that perfectly.

All Are to Return articulate their anguish at this fucked-up state of affairs by the medium of the harshest of noise. And it makes perfect sense. III isn’t quite Harsh Noise Wall, but it is fucking brutal. ‘Archive of the Sky’ is nothing short of devastating.

III hurts. It rakes at your guts, it rains heavy blows from every angle. It rapes your ears and pounds your cranium, it thumps your ribs and slays your sense. Every second is a sonic detonation, a devastation annihilation, a squall, a wall, an explosive blast, the sound of the world caving in, the sound of the absolute end. You want to hear the sound of the apocalypse? Listen to this, and live through the end of the world. It’s coming, and sooner than you care to contemplate.

AA