"It doesn't feel like anything just happened by accident with this record, like it had on the first one," says Jon Parkin, frontman of Salt Lake City, UT's Gaza. Their latest album, No Absolutes in Human Suffering, marks the band's third full-length that combines elements of hardcore, grind and sludge into an unorthodox extreme sound that is completely their own.
While the record maintains Gaza's heavy and aggressive characteristics, they've come a long way since their 2006 debut, I Don't Care Where I Go When I Die, continuing to evolve and refine their panicked, angular approach. "When we first started out, our intention was just to clear rooms ― to be aggravating and annoying, and to write music that was just hard to listen to," Parkin explains. "I still think we have a good part of that with us, but we certainly have matured in our songwriting."
"We have strange time signatures and really weird tuning and really odd textures; it's very extreme to listen to, but at the same time, there's song structure. We have taken time to make it something that's interesting to listen to, at least to us, and now it just feels like we're actually making music."
With No Absolutes in Human Suffering, Gaza have set a high standard for raw, thought-provoking music that is sincere and methodically planned out. "We knew full well what we were doing on this record. It wasn't like we were just kids trying to make an album and be strange, we had our brains around this one," he says.
Parkin explains that Gaza are prepared to continue on the path of honing their sound, by taking aspects of their previous releases and experimenting with new and interesting ideas to see what works, which is a formula they've become accustomed to. "We're not lost in the wilderness hoping that we can write another cool record. We know what we're doing and we know how to do it and everything we're doing is intentional."
While the record maintains Gaza's heavy and aggressive characteristics, they've come a long way since their 2006 debut, I Don't Care Where I Go When I Die, continuing to evolve and refine their panicked, angular approach. "When we first started out, our intention was just to clear rooms ― to be aggravating and annoying, and to write music that was just hard to listen to," Parkin explains. "I still think we have a good part of that with us, but we certainly have matured in our songwriting."
"We have strange time signatures and really weird tuning and really odd textures; it's very extreme to listen to, but at the same time, there's song structure. We have taken time to make it something that's interesting to listen to, at least to us, and now it just feels like we're actually making music."
With No Absolutes in Human Suffering, Gaza have set a high standard for raw, thought-provoking music that is sincere and methodically planned out. "We knew full well what we were doing on this record. It wasn't like we were just kids trying to make an album and be strange, we had our brains around this one," he says.
Parkin explains that Gaza are prepared to continue on the path of honing their sound, by taking aspects of their previous releases and experimenting with new and interesting ideas to see what works, which is a formula they've become accustomed to. "We're not lost in the wilderness hoping that we can write another cool record. We know what we're doing and we know how to do it and everything we're doing is intentional."
