27th January 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
The context for this, the debut release from Ergocaust, is in some ways an uplifting tale, whereby something positive emerges from a bad situation. They explain that the track was ‘Composed the day I got fired and refined until I made peace with reality, this song was forged out of blood, sweat, tears, hunger, and misery.’
The wheels of capitalism drive our lives, and we have simply no choice in the matter. Hate your job? Tough shit. Suck it up. You’re expendable, and easily replaced. Labour is cheap, and so is life, and not just to the highest echelons of society, but even to lower-level management. They’re only interested in the stats, and will do anything to save their own arses when under scrutiny by the next level up… and so it goes on up the hierarchy. The bottom line is about profit, and survival, and the person above you does not give a fuck about how you pay the rent or feed your family. It’s about how they pay their rent and feed their family, and how they can make cuts to boost their own bonus.
As Ergocaust writes, this ‘encapsulates the idea very neatly just by the title’. It’s fairly direct, and puts an emotive, anguish-laden spin on the notion that under capitalism, workers are confronted with the contradiction of producing and reproducing the conditions of their own alienation. Never mind religion: work is the opium of the masses, whereby the workers are too busy earning a crust and too exhausted from doing so to rebel. The reason everyone is trapped on the hamster wheel is that as much as you hate your job, you need to work to survive. You want out of the hellish job, but to be released from the hellish job is to wonder how you will survive. There are no options.
Ergocaust channels a host of conflicting emotions by the medium of a song with a complex, detailed structure, which draws together a range of musical styles, spanning black, thrash, and industrial metal to forge a compelling hybrid. The fact that its instrumental is perhaps an asset. Articulating complicated and conflicting emotions is something which, all too often, words fail to achieve: in such instances, the language of sound and the power of music serves the purpose more effectively.
It may clock in under three minutes, but ‘Souls In Pain At Work’ is dense and it speaks – by which I mean, it howls anguish, rage, pain. But therein lies beauty and joy, in that from trauma emerges great art.
Aural Aggravation 