“This is bigger than us, this is bigger than you.“
Reading detailed descriptions of music is a strange enough practice, but it’s even odder when the songs are done faster than the sentences that describe them. Massachusetts grindcore band Wasp Mother are no strangers to micro-punk songs. Digital Pollution is their third release, following Demo and Self-Loathing in 2022, and it clocks in at a titanic ten minutes. Along with refreshed production, Digital Pollution introduces Jenny Mac on vocals, brining her massive voice to powerviolence and providing a huge boost to the band. Kevin Sigourney is freed from the mic to focus on his guitar, in turn enabling even weirder songwriting. The result is a solid EP that really puts Wasp Mother’s discography on the underground grindcore map. Whilst Wasp Mother’s previous releases didn’t need much of a production upgrade, the main winner here are the drums, finally sounding crisp with a suitably obnoxious snare.
“Gravemouth” opens to feedback and an unassuming punk riff, hiding the oncoming violence which truly hits at the thirty-second mark. Gutturals from Mac are powerfully pissed. “Burnout” is a thirty nine second tom-groove intro to a three second grindcore burst, and it’s not even the shortest track. “Akathisia” takes that crown with its hilarious sample and twenty seconds of insane grind. “Boring” also opens on a sample, this time a bit lost on me, but the mix of stabbing chugs and mini-blast beats is absolutely not. “Hubris” has an almost party-like riff to contrast its protracted and panicked close. Across these tracks, the band have unchained themselves from any songwriting expectations, dispensed of the useless moments, and let rip.
“Pale” is a five minute epic, becoming the entire of “side two” of Digital Pollution (perhaps a structural nod to Nails’ “They Come Crawling Back”). It’s no less heavy than side one: bookended by noise segments, the tempo slides around in a natural and un-gridded fashion, clearly performed live for this recording. The breakdown ending can be seen coming from a long way off but it’s still a classic way to go out.
The theme of Digital Pollution is the ‘twenty-four-second-news-cycle’, and it rails against the way creators of all types of art have been turned into algorithm-feeders. Music is unfortunately particularly mired by this modern phenomenon. So, what better way to say that than to create completely furious, unmarketable songs that don’t even meet streaming services minimum track lengths? That’s not to mention the anger in these songs, applied to mourning the passage of the human condition toward consumerism. There’s no simple solution to repairing capitalist society’s relationship with art, but all the same: Digital Pollution is a solid record that asks for little of your time. Perhaps it’s the grindcore equivalent of touching grass.
7/10
Digital Pollution is out on the 19th January through independent release.