Motherless – Do You Feel Safe? (Traumatic Doom Punk)
Been craving something with punk attitude recently, and thankfully this one came in the promo set some weeks ago. I’ve been through probably 15 times since then. Chicago’s Motherless has a penchant for answering their own questions. The immediate answer to Do You Feel Safe? is a rather quick “no,” taking the paranoia of the digital age and constructing a collection of tracks built on pure trauma. A fitting approach for the combination of genres you’ll find here, which includes hardcore punk and sludge, in fact calling it doom punk, as I did in the title, probably doesn’t fully capture it, either. It’s post. Post-punk? Post many things, actually, including post-your life.
Here comes social breakdown fashioned into music. Motherless build their actually distinct sound on a number of features. You have a sentient bass that works like a pulse slowly ticking towards panic attack, guitars splintering the air with sharp tension, and vocals that can croon as readily as they can shout from the self-imposed social bunker they’ve been tossed into. Putting it all together into a collection of informational disillusionment, broken promises, and contradictory isolation while swamped by vast social media connections, Do You Feel Safe? is an abrasive look at a world on edge, though the edge, in the end, is inevitably on your own head, and no one else’s. Uncomfortable and angry, Motherless, based on just this debut alone, will probably carve out a hole for themselves in the concrete jungle.
Written by Stanley, Devourer of Souls
Motherless – Do You Feel Safe?
Prosthetic Records
Cover Art: Rosario Scimeca
4.5 / 5
