GELD Drop Video For “Fog Of War”

On Currency // Castration, Australia’s Geld render the dissociation and alienation of modern living with exacting precision. The album unfurls like a series of infinite reflections breaking down into fractal chaos—it becomes increasingly unclear whether one’s suffering comes from the outside world, or from the confines of one’s own skull. They’ve distilled a despairingly hellish vision of the world into a thundering crack to the temple, a naked and unsparing fusion of hardcore’s bleakest violence with metal’s ruthless strength-through-conviction. 

Cutting their teeth in the gutters of Melbourne’s teeming punk and hardcore scene, Geld established themselves as the forerunners of a new breed of deranged aggression with their first LP Perfect Texture (Iron Lung Records and Static Shock Records). This record was followed in quick succession by the EP Soft Power and LP Beyond the Floor, releases which saw the band progressively push their sound towards a heavier, dirge-inflected register. On Geld’s third LP—and first with Relapse Records— their miasmic excess gets a facelift. The result is a stripped bare, streamlined take upon hardcore in its purest form, reconstituted into a heavy, psychedelic dose of amphetamine thrills.

Geld are thuggy and unshakably, unsettlingly real. Vocalist Al Smith’s vernacular is existential yet anti-philosophical. On their lead track “Fog of War”, Geld inverts classic tropes of anti-war rhetoric and turns them inward, facing the listener with the terror of being subject to the whims of a world that has long since spiraled out of anyone’s control—least of all your own self. Listen today alongside its arresting video directed by James Gorter.

Recorded across the Southern Winter Solstice of June 2022, Currency // Castration is Geld’s most collaboratively written record to date. Although the writing process began with an initial desire to write a raging, straight-forward post-pandemic hardcore EP, this attempted exorcism of Geld’s isolation-driven fascinations quickly spilled out into a full-length’s worth of material, taking upon a fervor and mind of its own. While oft compared to the athletic determination of Equalizing Distort-era Gauze, the brutish nihilism of Die Kreuzen, and the motorik-flying-off-the-rails, oddball sensibility of Hawkwind, Geld’s approach to hardcore on Currency // Castration bears closer spiritual resemblance to the throbbing, crushingly direct orientation of industrial dance music. Each song is executed at the edge of the band’s compositional ability, surgically worked and reworked with the sole purpose of maximizing the percussive tension between momentum and inertia, creating a wall of sound which offers catharsis only through the direct build up and release of a maddening energy.

With Currency // Castration, Geld offer no promise of a higher purpose or resolve. Rather, they lean into dissociation, finding truth and meaning in the transcendental joy of simply escaping, surviving, existing. Their sound will find a welcome home with those who have found their purpose in the dejection of outsider music and outcast art.