- For a band as wracked by nihilism as Hope Drone, it sometimes seems a wonder they manage to put out records at all. Certainly it goes some way to excusing the four years it’s been since their last album, Cloak Of Ash. Summoning all their remaining strength the Brisbane black-metallers have surged back on to the recorded medium, a testament in stone amidst the dust of failure, an Ozymandian tribute to the pointlessness of it all. Actually that’s not quite true and it marks a key difference between the band’s latest material and what came before. It’s captured in the title, Void Lustre, a sparkling in the endless darkness, refusing to be extinguished.
Although it’s difficult to decipher the tortured screaming of frontman Chris Rowden, the lyrics that I’ve been privy to capture him at an uptick in his mood. Where Cloak Of Ash seemed to plunge toward the inevitable destruction of the world and everything in it, Void Lustre has discovered a balance of sorts: one where the encroaching darkness is kept at bay by the raw, agonised will of existence and the only meaning in life is scavenged from that struggle . To wit: “This body will be ash / and every word it spoke / into the void and nothing / All things resolved / In the quiet / But for this impermanence, there would be no meaning / and I will hold every breath / in the palm of my hands, And will it back into your lungs / That your essence would sustain.” It’s hardly a rose-garden and Rowden seems, lyrically, to have retreated even further inside himself to find this last kernel of resistance, but find it he does. Hope Drone are like a darker shadow of the existentialists: vomiting the chronic depression of a Schopenhauer, or the bitter worldview of a Sartre, whose famous title appears to be perversely misquoted in album opener, Being Into Nothingness.
Musically, Hope Drone are still reaching into the modern black-metal bag-of-tricks. They borrow liberally from ambient, post-rock and sludge, much like their avant-garde cousins Wolves In The Throneroom and Deafheaven. In the time I’ve spent with Void Lustre, however, although the echoes of sludge are prevalent and debts to bands like Isis and Neurosis more noticeable, Hope Drone’s commitment to the blast beats and the core grind seems stronger than ever. Where Deafheaven are sounding increasingly like a psych band and WITR disappeared altogether in a cloud of ambience, Hope Drone are staying true, or at least as true as it’s possible to be, to whatever black metal is these days. It might even be a philosophical commitment: in the face of change, dissolution and death, we will be a bulwark, a fortress of constancy, the brightness against the background void.
Now that I say it, it seems like a powerful sentiment in a way that I don’t think was immediately obvious to me. At the risk of being pompous and pretentious, as I write this, the world, from the arctic tundra to the Amazon is literally on fire and if people that are smarter than me are to be believed, we may well be on our way to disappearing in the smoke, the obscuring darkness. In that world we could do with a little constancy, a lustre in the void. Can anyone do more than struggle to hold on to that impermanent flicker, before we all go out altogether?
- Chris Cobcroft.