Barely a year since the release of their debut recording, an EP entitled Thorns, Guiltless return with their first full-length, Teeth to Sky. If the band are unfamiliar to you, the four members surely won’t be.
The quartet, three of which were in A Storm of Light – including that band’s mastermind Josh Graham (also of Battle of Mice and the former visual artist of the legendary Neurosis) – also feature Dan Hawkins, Sacha Dunable and Billy Graves, respective musicians in Generation of Vipers and Intronaut. In other words, it’s a veritable ‘Who’s Who?’ of the underground metal scene, all of whom have a penchant for stretching the boundaries of what the loud distorted rumble we all love and care about so much can mean, can sound like, and can possibly achieve.
Thorns was an EP from 2024 that introduced the world to Guiltless, released on Neurot (of course – as does this LP), and I was excited to hear the four tracks on offer. The EP was principally written by Graham, and while it was very good, that fact showed. Much like it’s stark front cover – a dark grey with a lighter grey logo emblazoned upon it – the four tracks lumbered as towering monolith but felt indistinct.
Given the crumbling world we live in, Graham had quite understandably returned to the subject matter he has made so keenly associated with his artistry. Namely, diary entries from the logical culmination of the Anthropocene Era; the thrashing, death rattle of neoliberal capitalism rendering our darling Earth sickly and not able – or willing – to sustain human civilisation, or at least this iteration of it. Grandiose subject matter for bludgeoning, epic music, then. The four tracks were crushing, enveloping, but due to its singular tone, Thorns felt surprisingly muted, bemusing in how forgettable it proved to be when out of sight and out of mind.
Teeth to Sky revisits this subject matter and its cover shares the languid grey hues of its forebear, albeit with a photorealism cover, with a repetition of the band’s logo (?), or iconography. Despite my critique of Thorns, I still enjoyed it, and it served as it was intended – an intriguing taste of what might be to come – and so Guiltless’ debut album has been high on my anticipated records out at the start of this year.
The album comprises of eight songs, all of which have been written collaboratively by the quartet. This is immediately apparent in the flavour of their composition, but also how this has seemingly shifted the lyrical focus. Don’t get things twisted, Guiltless are still doom & gloom – we are pushing this world past the point of no return, after all – but Graham also reflects on how one must still take advantage of your life; and the incredulity and sheer amazement at the completely insane fact that not only does humanity exist but that we – you! – exist as an individual at all. It would seem saccharine were it not the fact that it’s one of those few truths that, if one does take a moment to reflect at any point and in any mood, it immediately awes, overwhelms, and must be treated as truth.
It is this hope – or is it just acceptance? – that imbues Teeth to Sky with far more vim, verve, and vigour than before. There are more musical touch points than before, too. Thorns felt like a slab of doom focused post-metal that couldn’t breach beyond its’ own foundations and unconscious limitations, whereas this album insists upon dynamism: in tempo, rhythm, volume, and timbre. The band may still paint in monochrome shades, but they do so with as wide a gradient of grey in their palette as that cobalt insistence allows them.
The sonic maelstrom kicks in almost immediately on opening track ‘Into Dust Becoming’, with the four-piece immediately proving they’re locked in, and all armaments are fully loaded. It’s a pulverising introduction to Teeth to Sky, even for those who had been indoctrinated to their sound via the EP. ‘One is Two’ and ‘In Starless Reign’ bring the pace down. The Breach-esque post-hardcore abates and instead a trapped, confined, Meshuggah energy furiously takes centre stage. It’s an impressive propulsive sound that also brings to mind labelmates Kowloon Walled City, in both tonality and in their ability to transfix with their riff’s instinctual lurching, hulking sensibility.
‘Our Serpent in Circle’ is a lengthier track, closing out the first part of the record, the Side A on a piece of vinyl, as-it-were. It’s a rich tapestry: multifaceted and with a sound eerily reminiscent The Jesus Lizard randomly choosing to cover a track from one of the earlier A Storm of Light records. It sounds stellar.
The title track ushers itself out from a brief pause between the tracks with a similar overall tone, before becoming increasingly impatient with itself and incorporating a restless churn that brings to mind Cherubs at their most frantic, with only Graham’s plaintive cleaner vocal melody holding things together, and reminding the listener where this track had journeyed from.
‘Lone Blue Vale’ blasts from the speakers next, returning to the raucous higher tempo of the album opener, that meets in the hinterland where Coalesce slowed themselves to what they might dub a crawl. The second half of the track somewhat repeats the same trick as ‘Teeth to Sky’, which – while effective – does strike as an odd sound to revisit quite so soon. It eventually lurches into a bulky, bruising closing that finishes the song off strongly.
‘Landscape of Thorns’ is a decent four-minutes and change of blunt sludge goodness but doesn’t quite live up to the high-quality of the rest of Teeth to Sky. It does, however pave the way for the wonderful closing track, ‘Illumine’. Another long track – the lengthiest on the record, in fact – to close off the second side of wax [in the physical realm!], this epic is its own beast. It is epic Guiltless, not an echo of the member’s past post-metal project’s epic finales. Downcast, grey, and wretched, it roils and rumbles, before finding the light and closing the quartet’s debut LP in a precarious but powerful fashion.
Teeth to Sky was recorded by Travis Kammeyer, mixed by Kurt Ballou, and mastered by Brad Boatright. It sounds huge. The band have vastly improved upon the rough blueprint their EP, Thorns, provided. This album is very, very good. So, why haven’t I fallen in love with it, as it feels I should, and all the words of this review suggest I have?
I scoured my brain and finally had a hunch. I looked it up and sure enough I was correct. And this point feels so rich, given the incredible names that make up this band, tenured as they are in the underground metal scene. But… Prior to the release of Teeth to Sky, Guiltless hadn’t played as a band live before. And damn, do I think these tracks needed to be hammered and honed on the stage for a while before the quartet found their way into the studio.
I’m not sure I’d even advocate for the songs to be that much, if at all different, but I would suggest that with a few gigs or a tour, some secret, hitherto undiscovered elements might have been unearthed. The PR materials suggest there are other subgenres also present, but I can’t hear them. Perhaps live, these would have naturally found ways to surface. These eight tracks will sound MASSIVE live, and I definitely want to witness them being played, but I do somewhat mourn the fact that some tiny tweaks would have breathed even more frenzied savagery and indignant wrath into the sonic landscape of this record.
A bludgeoning debut – but it bluntly bruises and angrily bellows; it doesn’t scream us into ruinous silence; it doesn’t land a final fatal sharp lacerating blow. Perhaps that’s only apt – wounded, we must suffer to watch this world whimper to its close. Humanity’s curse for its own vainglorious pride. Not guiltless at all, but guilty as all sin.
