Indonesia’s Deathwords latest is an antidote for all the New Year’s optimism currently clogging your feed. The Malang-based band delivers nearly six minutes of crushing, mid-tempo hardcore called “Abandon the Truth.” The song marks a change of direction for Deathwords, a band that used to play fast, blast-beat-filled metalcore, toward something heavier and, dare we say, more mature.
To be honest here, “Abandoned the Truth,” isn’t exactly a new song. The single first saw the light of day on Deathwords’ split with the Singapore groove metal unit Dante’s Theory for last year’s Cassette Store Day. But the music video, shot entirely in moody black and white around their adopted hometown of Malang (the band is from Pandaan, a town in Pasuran, East Java), just came out this month.
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The video, like the song itself, is devastating in its repetitiveness. You can truly feel the boredom of the band’s daily life in small-city Indonesia, as the guitars repeat the same heavy riff, slowly drawing us into a world of darkness and pessimism. And in a world where fake news and hoaxes make bigger headlines than reality, is there anything more fitting than a song called “Abandon the Truth”?
