The aural onslaught is as immediate as it is impactful, shocking in its viciousness and volatility; just seconds into A Biblical Worship of Violence, the unrelenting debut EP from TEETH, the listener is engulfed in undiluted aggression with the heart-stopping urgency of an air raid siren.
“We knew what this band needed to sound like before we’d even played a note,” says guitarist Chris LeMasters, who, along with longtime comrade and collaborator Blake Prince on vocals, birthed TEETH back in 2019. “This wasn’t about writing a single or getting on the fucking radio – just pure violence, through and through.”
Over the years, he’d amassed an arsenal of riffs that were simply too fierce for any of his existing projects, so he and Prince went up to the attic studio in his Fort Erie, ON, home and got to work with no pretentions or delusions of grandeur. “It had to be emotional, but purely visceral – like a direct sonic replication of some of the things we were struggling through at the time.”
Adds Prince: “It was just effortless from the start.”
Initially, they were satiated as a studio project, dropping a string of singles through to 2021 that gained impressive traction and left some grisly carnage in their wake; but a formal collection seemed like the logical next step – and a growing chorus of voices was demanding the same.
Available via New Damage / Nuclear Blast, A Biblical Worship of Violence offers a more potent distillation of the raw ingredients that made TEETH’s earlier cuts so imperiously compelling – cyclonic riffs, menacing vocals, and thunderous breakdowns that hit like a Molotov cocktail of orchestrated chaos. And the lyricism is as lethal as the searing soundtrack that accompanies it – a sharp commentary on the darkest and most demented corners of the human condition.
Hearing the results of their sessions with co-producer / engineer Davis Maxwell and mixer / mastering engineer Lance Prenc, LeMasters and Prince realized they were hungry to get back on stage, and the forced tethers of a global pandemic only calcified that resolve.
“We’ve been in this for a while with a bunch of different projects, but it feels like we haven’t done everything we’re supposed to do yet,” Prince muses about their newfound vigor with TEETH. “Taking over a stage and just unleashing raw energy onto a volatile crowd, it feels honest and fun again.”
And whether it’s A Biblical Worship of Violence bleeding through a commuter’s earbuds or hundreds of fans packed elbow-to-elbow in front of a makeshift stage on a skatepark slab, that’s the goal – delivering TEETH’s unmatched sonic chaos that ruthlessly swallows you whole.
“We are not the same,” Prince shouts with swagger over swelling feedback partway through “Drip,” and were he hypothetically referring to the hordes of derivative artists pretending to move the needle in an over-saturated post-hardcore scene, well, he’d be absolutely right.
