Releases

Ten of Swords

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Ten of Swords is Sacral's second EP, and to date the only release with live drums. The release contains songs of destruction and despair. It's intended to highlight the darkness of the world--the Ten of Swords we're all dealt through endless war and war profiteering, racism, sexism, alienation, and mental illness.

The first track, "Punish the Weak," is an indictment of the American military industrial complex. Soldiers who slaughter civilians are cowards, especially when using the kind of advanced technology that the United States military is so proud of. The companies who manufacture these terrifying weapons in the name of profit are just as complicit, if not more, than those sit in a comfortable desk chair, pressing a button to erase dozens of lives at a time while they sip their coffee. The politicians who divert citizens' tax dollars to these wars, rather than using them for the things we need to live, are even worse. The sample in the track is a leaked recording from an airstrike in Baghdad in 2007. It's the one part of the release that I'm honestly still a little uncomfortable listening to.

"Annihilator" was inspired by the documentary "American Murderer," about a man named Chris Watts, who committed familicide--the act of killing one's immediate family. As far as anyone can tell, the grisly act was carried out simply because Watts couldn't tolerate his wife anymore. The obvious question is "why not just get a divorce?" It's important to note that most family annihilators are men in their 30s, and it feels important to me that Watts lived in a giant house in a desolate suburban sprawl. In the documentary, there's a recording of Watts making an offhand comment implying that women have friends, and men don't. This highlights the harmful, sexist attitude that men ought to be stoic and emotionally unavailable. We're taught to avoid understanding our own emotions, mistakenly thinking that ignoring them is the same thing as controlling them. Combine this with living in a suburban environment, completely physically isolated from anything but your own home. Then, when an emotionally stunted, and particularly volatile man is faced with the possibility of losing his one and only intimate relationship, he's unable to deal, and instead explodes, destroying everything around him.

When I started this project, I knew I wanted to cover a song by the Mountain Goats. "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" was a perfect choice, about a paranoid, delusional person who's isolated and alienated from the greater world around them.

"It Stares Back" is the most personal track on the EP, about my personal struggles with depression. It's a song that, at the time of release I'd been trying to write for upwards of ten years. Some of the lyrics and melodies were written sometime around 2011, some of them were written more recently. I haven't had a stint of depression that lasted longer than a couple days in several years. These days, even such short bouts are few and far between. I think I needed time between myself and these long-term states of depression in order to give the song a satisfactory ending.

Vocals and instruments by Ash.
All drums played by Chris/Yeung Human and recorded by Charlie at Lafarge Terminal. I'm in another band with both of them, called North Star the Wanderer.
Cover art by Galster Art Collective.

Released July 7, 2022.