Human beings are not, as they like to suppose, naturally decent creatures temporarily misled by bad systems. The systems are bad because the creatures are bad, or at least frightened, vain, obedient, and easily drugged by slogans. Give a man a flag, an enemy, and permission, and he will discover in himself a talent for cruelty he would otherwise have called impossible. Yet the odd fact remains that kindness persists as contraband. That’s the central focus of Decomposition by Choke Chain.
Decomposition comes out of the speakers with the charm of a basement interrogation, every drum hit landing like bad news delivered by someone who has stopped blinking: five slabs of body music dragged through punk wiring, hard-drive rot, and the kind of private collapse that makes sleep feel like an accusation.
Mark Trueman works fast, ugly, and close to the nerve, shoving 90s dark electro discipline into hardcore punk’s scraped-throat panic until the machine starts to sound sick of its own orders. The beats have a squared-off club utility, yet the production keeps tearing at the edges, letting distortion chew through the mix like rats inside a wall. The reference points are obvious enough to anyone with old Leæther Strip, Placebo Effect, :wumpscut:, Mentallo & The Fixer, Skinny Puppy, Youth Code, yelworC, Front Line Assembly, or The Klinik in their bloodstream, but Trueman is no museum docent polishing black rubber relics for the faithful.
“The EP was mostly written during a time where I was very close to giving up,” says Trueman. “Everything felt completely hopeless, and still does to some degree. I really tried to put all of that feeling into these songs. I also tried to confront some of my personal trauma on this record, which is something I’ve pretty explicitly tried not to do through my music in the past.”
Decomposition paces, grinds, spits, and stares, building a locked room where dread becomes rhythm, and trauma gets translated into metal-on-bone percussion. The vocals come through like a man arguing with the part of himself that keeps picking up the knife, while the synths smear acid across the walls without turning the record into mere genre cosplay. Plenty of current industrial acts chase severity as an outfit, but Choke Chain makes severity feel lived-in, cracked, and inconveniently alive.
The accompanying video, shot and edited by Videowaste in Chicago, IL, understands that this music needs no clean visual explanation. It feels like a hijacked broadcast from an underground TV station at 3:17 a.m., confrontational, glitchy, staticky, weird, and hostile to any viewer who expects a neat little performance clip. The image breaks down, bodies blur, faces turn into bad signals, and the whole frame seems to rot while the track keeps hammering forward. It has the sickly immediacy of public-access horror, VHS decay, and surveillance footage left too long in a damp room. Instead of prettifying CHOKE CHAIN’s violence, Videowaste lets the picture malfunction in sympathy with it, so the screen becomes another instrument: busted, blinking, and accusing.
Watch the video for Decomposition below:
By the end, Decomposition has earned its title through attrition. The EP does not offer catharsis in any polite therapeutic sense; it gives you impact, repetition, abrasion, and a bleak little proof that survival can sound hideous while still being survival. Negative Gain is sending this out on CD, vinyl LP, and digital formats July 10, and anyone expecting relief should bring their own oxygen.
Listen to Decomposition below and pre-order the album, out 10 July on Negative Gain Productions, here.
Catch Choke Chain live:
- 6/23 Minneapolis, MN – New World
- 6/24 Eau Claire, WI – The Plus
- 6/25 Madison, WI – Gamma Ray Bar
- 6/26 Chicago, IL – Sleeping Village
- 6/27 Milwaukee, WI – Quarter’s
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