One Last Great Grind Album Before 2017 Ends: The Heads Are Zeroes’ Self-Titled Release

Baltimore’s The Heads Are Zeroes put out their self-titled album all the way back in April, but I just learned about it yesterday, when Christopher Luedtke published his list of the year’s best grind albums on Metal Injection. That’s a LOT of listening time I’ve missed out on, but I’ve tried to make up for it in the past twenty-four hours by replaying the album 1,440 times. Although, truth be told, I probably would have done that whenever the record came to my attention, because it’s really, really good.

Picking up where Gridlink’s Longhena left off, the trio’s music might best be described as “melo-math-grind.” Sure, the music is often a fast, knotted entanglement of guitar shredding and blastbeats (courtesy of David Gill and Mike Barth), and yes, vocalist Olivia Helen Henry screams like she’s actively trying to vomit out her own guts. But there’s also no shortage of slower, dreamier moments that are, frankly, melancholic; OHH’s repeated question during the track “X” (all the songs are Roman numerals) — “When will you give up on me?” — feels like the sentiment behind the entire album. Even on a track like “VIII”  when she bellows “You think you’ve suffered? I’ll show you suffering,” the threat seems to have originated from a place of desperate anguish.

Or maybe the record is just a Rorschach test and I’m projecting onto it.

Either way, The Heads Are Zeroes is fucking killer, and you should check it out.

You can do so below! Buy the album here for just eight bucks. It is so, so very worth it.