Label - Church Road Records
Release Date - 29 April 2022
Words - Tony Bliss
These are indeed heady days for our fair isles heavy music scene, meaning we never have to look too far for a fresh and deafening new band to add to the ever growing list of exciting things going on in the UK underground. Heriot have got plenty of tongues wagging and ears pricked of late with their heroically heavy live show (and a particularly savage cover of Machine Head classic ‘Ten Ton Hammer’), however it is with ‘Profound Morality’, their debut EP, that the enormous creative potential of this fresh-faced four piece really comes to light.
It’s certainly true to say that, on face value, Heriot’s remarkably violent sound pulls together various strains of hardcore, extreme metal and post-rock that we’ve all heard before, however it is the band’s uncanny ability to twist and disfigure these elements into something that resembles nothing else in the game - even at this early stage in their career - that leaves the biggest impression here.
Sub two-minute ragers ‘Carmine’, ‘Near Vision’ and (a slightly longer) ‘Enter The Flesh’ get in and out with all the subtlety of a ritual disemboweling, dense and suffocating waves of sonic hate-sludge thrust into our lug ‘oles and left to seethe in our subconscious. Longer cuts such as the title track and ‘Coalescence’ fuse the bands churning blood-lust with a surprising textual awareness, Debbie Gough’s ethereal vocals and a spaciously industrial thud marking a particularly effective departure in sound, whereas ‘Mutagen’ and ‘Abattoir’ are the sort of experimental excursions you rarely hear from bands of twice Heriot’s vintage, dark ambient and broken beats colliding in a inky fug of amorphis static and noise.
Make no mistake, for all their ambition and imagination, ‘Profound Morality’ is never anything less than grotesquely dark and thoroughly engaging. This is eight tracks that showcase the blossoming of four extraordinary and highly individual young talents, and with such lofty ideas as we have heard here, the most exciting thing is this is just the beginning.
8/10
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