Big pharma’s number one
The middle kingdom
They’ll OD everyone
Where has the narcan gone
Detroit’s VAZUM, the brainchild of Zach Pliska and Emily Sturm, doesn’t tread lightly; they carve through the noise with relentless force. From the heart of their Light Echo Studio, they have sculpted a body of work that refuses restraint, a collision of raw energy and spectral beauty. Their self-dubbed “deathgaze” sound, ferocious yet hypnotic, floods the senses, drenched in distortion and propelled by unrelenting rhythms. They uphold a steadfast refusal to conform; a strike against the mundane.
Western Violence is the title track from VAZUM’s latest album, released last year. A venomous indictment of addiction, violence, and the hypocrisy woven into the fabric of a crumbling society, Western Violence tears through the bleak landscape of substance abuse, corporate greed, and vigilante justice, painting a world where overdose is a commodity, Big Pharma fuels destruction, and self-appointed enforcers stalk the streets, armed and emboldened. Anger boils beneath every line: rage at a system that turns lives into statistics, fury at those who revel in their own cruelty. The song is a lacerating scream against a culture built on death, where no one dies alone, yet no one is truly free. Truly a dark anthem for our unsettling times.
The band took to the streets of Jackson, Mississippi, to conjure a vision of decay, desperation, and the grim specters that lurk in plain sight. A skeletal figure drifts through a graveyard, weaving between crumbling tombstones, while flashes of a harsher, more immediate reality flicker in its wake. Pill bottles spill into trembling hands; a cold barrel catches the light; hooded figures slink through alleys where menace lingers like smoke. These aren’t just images; they are warnings, echoes of a world unraveling, stitched together with stark finality. The video, raw and unflinching, serves as both requiem and reckoning, a mirror held up to the forgotten corners of America.
With their UK tour looming, VAZUM releases this visual omen as a prelude, a forewarning, a dare. The road ahead is long, the night unrelenting, and the music, like the ghosts that haunt these streets, refuses to rest.
Watch the video for “Western Violence” below:
Listen to Western Violence below, and order the album here.
Catch VAZUM on tour in the UK:
- February 27th Manchester
- February 28th Nottingham
- March 1st Leeds
- March 2nd Gateshead
- March 5th Glasgow
- March 6th Edinburgh
- March 8th Morecambe
