“Life is temporary, pain is forever.”
Being ingrained in the music scene for nearly twenty-five years, irrespective of whatever categorical realm you operate in, is a noteworthy achievement. Just as impressive is a sustained consistency regarding pace in release cycles, progressing your sound on each iteration, and altogether maintaining a reputation as the gold standard. For the underground landscape, no band has embodied the aforementioned characteristics and every palpable fiber of what defines the foundational rudiments of bare-knuckle beatdown hardcore quite like The Acacia Strain. Go to any compact basement show, and chances are most, if not everyone there, is enamored to some extent with the upstate New York quintet. Misanthropic-laced carnage with a fondness for mutually assured destruction has been their prevailing ambition since the day …And Life Is Very Long dropped in 2002 like a nuclear warhead with a smiley face scribbled on its tip.
Many acts spend their entire careers—no matter how long or short—establishing a true identity. The Acacia Strain, on the other hand, have never been known as a group to merely subvert expectations or distinguishable proclivities on a whim, especially when their initial bid at garnering some semblance of a following worked out as well as it did. Through the years, The Acacia Strain have conceptualized into an inevitable force. Everyone and their failed hip replacement, two-step pit veteran elders know who the fuck they are and what they are all about. The Acacia Strain spare no expense in making us all feel the perennial despair of the human condition and ensuring we’re eviscerated into nihility. This is them and no one else.
There is such a thing as aging like fine wine, and we have been fortunate enough to witness it as time has passed for The Acacia Strain. In 2023, the greybeard overlords of hardcore unleashed their duology of honed torment with a short but lethal pummeling in Step Into the Light and the unorthodox yet menacingly doomy Failure Will Follow. This double-barrel shotgun blast was likely a staunch reminder that the bitterness of mortality had yet to befall Albany’s non-belief-core practitioners. Above all, it was a creative semi-veering for The Acacia Strain in terms of usual output. For all the self-loathing archetypes that Step Into the Light was riddled with, Failure Will Follow begat a chasm of depressive hopelessness, a ruination of any potentially uplifting attitude towards our existence in a perpetually declining world. As many were probably thinking, could it possibly get any more dreary than this? In the band’s own words: It can always get worse.
It appears we have underestimated man’s capacity for unending despair, as Step Into the Light and Failure Will Follow were only the tip of the weeping iceberg for The Acacia Strain. Sole-remaining founding member and vocalist Vincent Bennett took to socials back in March about creating the record he and the band wanted to, not the album we were expecting. All these months later, there is an undeniable truth to that sentiment.
You Are Safe From God Here is unlucky entry number thirteen for the longtime navigators of affliction and eternal strife. Musically, You Are Safe From God Here is, in fact, much of what we have become accustomed to from The Acacia Strain. This, however, is not where Bennett’s statement is applicable. Rather, it is within its topical backdrop where You Are Safe From God Here stands as the observable materialization of every sopping ounce of sadness that you can be burdened with. Many have come to know The Acacia Strain for the continuous dejection and misanthropy that comprised their discography for two and a half decades, but never to this amplified a degree. The Acacia Strain have virtually redefined what constitutes permanent unhappiness, and have backed it with a forthright outpouring of anger. As its moniker suggests, You Are Safe From God Here may give us the illusion of welfare when disconnected from spiritual opium, but pain never ceases to fester. A tragic masterpiece, You Are Safe From God Here is the breaking of a cerebral dam that’s somehow managed to withhold an incalculable volume of despondence much longer than it should have, with even the slightest amount of solace nowhere to be found.
The Acacia Strain have always been an unconventional escape avenue. If you’re looking for something uplifting, this is not the place to be, at least in a traditional sense. This is a group that has taken the shared misery approach, such that we can all find peace in knowing that suffering is not independently siloed, if there is any tranquility to be had at all in that regard. You Are Safe From God Here reiterates this outlook immediately with a daunting public service announcement on “eucharist I: BURNT OFFERING”. Supplemented with all the battering drums and tuned-lower-than-hell strings that The Acacia Strain have effectively trademarked, Bennett’s searing vocals are more intimidating than any conceivable higher power he’s condemning. This vilification of false idols only permeates into more resentful outbursts as You Are Safe From God Here advances.
Now more than ever, The Acacia Strain look to stress the idea of corporeal reality as the true definition of hell, while masquerading under the guise of salvation. “THE MACHINE THAT BLEEDS” and “I DON’T THINK YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE IT” are no-holds-barred drubbings into submission that seditiously mock any benevolent characteristics devout belief may have. In between the maelstroms of pinch harmonics and earth-shattering blast beats, The Acacia Strain’s vehement disdain for coerced holy adherence is out in full display. If it wasn’t already obvious, You Are Safe From God Here is an album you can feel every bit of. Every riff from Mike Mulholland, Devin Shidaker, and Griffin Landa. Every hammer stroke from drummer Matt Guglielmo. Every reverberating screech into the abyss from Bennett. The Acacia Strain have their own subset of steadfast philosophies, and it’s bleaker than ever.
Speaking on musicianship, it’s quite impressive that The Acacia Strain have been able to cultivate this melancholic atmosphere with typical approaches alone. No synths, keyboards, or backing effects to be heard, just the clattering echoes of instrumentals from individuals fraught with woe. End-of-days soundtracks “A CALL BEYOND”, “SWAMP MENTALITY”, and “ACOLYTE OF THE ONE” specifically demonstrate this aptitude very well. As an artist, putting as much of yourself into the tools at your disposal is a considerable driver of impact. Arguably, The Acacia Strain mastered this well before You Are Safe From God Here was even a thought. As of now, that notion is indisputable given the catastrophic ambience resonating from this album.
For as enshrouded in sorrow as You Are Safe From God Here is, this ultimately is a byproduct of unfettered rage. There are no recoils or respites at any juncture of the record, only reinforced desires to see the world burn. “AEONIAN WRATH” is hauntingly apocalyptic, even by The Acacia Strain standards. This is further exacerbated by “MOURNING STAR” and the meteorite rainfall of “HOLY MOONLIGHT”. Even when Bennett shifts focus from self-destruction, it turns into the collective loathing of an irredeemable reality where nothing but the cataclysmic end of it is warranted.
Familiarly, The Acacia Strain’s penchant for reiteration was going to find its way into You Are Safe From God Here, one way or another. “SACRED RELIC” is the sludge-covered exemplar of this. “There is no god” rings over the latter half of the track, with The Acacia Strain becoming increasingly more infuriated and emphatic in their musical and vocal bellows. As You Are Safe From God Here begins crawling to a close, The Acacia Strain have made it abundantly clear that life itself is hell. With that, it seems the reprisal of The Acacia Strain’s messaging here is poignant. After all, perhaps that is what hell is: repetition.
The closing portions of You Are Safe From God Here are grief-stricken floodgates fully opening. Naturally, the gradual buildup of fury often leads to an emotional fissure of desolation. “WORLD GONE COLD” pigeonholes some of this, but maintains a lingering hint of malice. The brutalizing hardcore sensibilities are still there, but with respect to all prior compositions, the penultimate song sets the stage for the full relinquishment of any scraps of joy The Acacia Strain may have had hidden away during this run.
Many would rightfully consider Failure Will Follow an experimental release, but it’s clear that its murky undertones propagated onto You Are Safe From God Here. Closer “eucharist ii: BLOOD LOSS”, which draws out to a third of the album’s length, is the release of heartbroken acceptance. Every preceding shout to a nonexistent heaven and hell culminates into a highly varied formation of The Acacia Strain’s tenured exploration over the last quarter century. While an inherent gamble to footnote a collection of wrathfully cynical lashings with something as broad as “eucharist ii: BLOOD LOSS”, it nonetheless expresses the tribulations of unrelenting setbacks with progressive sectional shifts that coincide with every stage of grief. As all fades out, You Are Safe From God Here has descended into the oblivion it so desperately coveted, with its cascading trail of death and turmoil leaving an imperishable scar behind.
If there exists any essential listen in a year that has been rife with career-defining releases, it is You Are Safe From God Here. This is the arrangement of a band that has figured everything out and continues to provide nuanced approaches to a benchmark sound that no one else has managed to replicate. The spells of aging, excluding obvious maturation, have once again eluded The Acacia Strain, with no indications of deterioration becoming a concern anytime soon. You Are Safe From God Here is not just a blueprint for how to architect a generational album, but a gleaming pretense for how heavy music should be universally approached going forward.
10/10
You Are Safe From God Here releases on October 24th via Rise Records and can be pre-ordered here.