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Vile Consumption

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Vile Consumption is Sacral's first full-length album. All told, from writing to completion, it took about a year and a half to produce. Looking back, I would have expected it to take longer. The title refers to humanity's unending need to consume everything in our path. Natural resources, commercial products, other animals, other humans, even the Earth itself. If unchecked, this unending compulsion will certainly destroy us all.

"New Guard of the Old Ways" is about the way tech companies use a capitalistic framework to sell us solutions to problems created by capitalism. I'm no Christian, but I think about the book of Ecclesiastes a lot. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun--and nothing better for the people under the sun than to eat, drink, and be merry.

"Slaughterhouse" is vegan propaganda, plain and simple. I thought about the song "Caisse" by Cloud Rat when writing this one. It takes the perspective of a calf, born into a system of industrial exploitation and slaughter. It had a huge impact on me, even before going vegan. I wanted to replicate that effect.

I think that the lyrics for "No One Wins" are fairly obvious. Come to think of it, most of the lyrics on this album are pretty obvious. Fuck subtlety! This song is about the ongoing climate collapse we're all forced to live through. In a way, it's optimistic. I've read article after article about memebers of the capitalist class preparing for "The Event," a catastrophe in which all their money and power would become useless. As time passes, it becomes apparent that this "Event" will be climate collapse. I've read about plans for underground bunkers, private islands, even guards with shock collars (no joke). In true capitalist fashion, these are wealthy people thinking with their wealth. The obvious solution is to avoid total collapse by prioritizing human needs over profit, but that's always been deemed insanity by capitalists. Instead, they choose to pursue over-the-top supervillain-esque plots. I take some grim comfort in the fact that inane schemes like this are sure to fail. In the end, no one will win.

It's been too long since I've written some haunted Americana, and "The Ghost in Your Head" (aka a blatant ripoff of "Radial Highway" by Devin Townsend) is the result. It's about the way surveillance leads us to self-censor. I think this is especially true in the age of social media, when we learn to dance around certain terms and topics to avoid getting flagged by some mysterious algorithm, and when internet activity gets compiled and woven together to form more and more accurate images of us and the things we do.

"World Tumor" is about capitalism, from the perspective of capital. I considered making it the album's title track, since consumption is at the heart of capital. Capitalism is dinstinguished by having the same M.O. as cancer--grow and consume, unendingly, until the host is destroyed.

Like with "No One Wins," it's hard to get more obvious than "Parallels." It's about the ongoing genocide of Palestine and its people at the hands of Israel and the US, but also the way that humans' historical memory seems to be so short. We gave up so many rights in the wake of 9/11, and cheered on an illegal, unjust war whose main casualties were civilians. Americans cheered for collective punishment against an entire ethno-religious group based on the despicable actions of a few. Actions that were made inevitable by the US's brutal record of destruction and human rights violations. Now, it's all happening again.

"Burning Olive Trees" is a direct follow-up. It's an expression of disgust at the horrors that have been streamed, real time, from the site of a total genocide.

"The Ratchet and the Noose" was one of the earliest songs written for this project. In it, I'm trying to navigate feelings of despair and hopelessness in the face of a world ruled by hatred and ignorance. The title is a reference to the rightward ratchet of US electoral politics. Conservatives (who have always been fascist collaborators, now supplanted by unambiguous fascisits) cut back on the few scraps of legal protections that the working class have in favor of lower corporate tax rates and kickbacks for the ultra-wealthy. Liberals make things a little better, but never give us back what we had before, and never give us the better protections and living standards they promise. This song feels like it was written specifically for the second Trump administration, but I wrote it during the Biden administration, when another Trump term seemed like a tiny, distant possibility. As the smoke from the Canadian wildfires stung my eyes in the summer of 2024, all the way down in Massachusetts, I couldn't shake a vision of societal collapse that would come no matter who was in the White House. The system is geared to collapse in on us.

I let my inner utopian out in the last track, "One Day, When the Old Ways Are Dead and Gone." It's a refutation of pro-status-quo arguments about "human nature," that we always have to compete and exploit, that we can never cooperate with each other or the world we live in. We're all capable of rational thought, no matter how deep we may bury it. We don't have to hoard resources like frightened wild beasts. I want to live in a society where I'm permitted to enjoy the beauty of the world, without having every drop of profitability squeezed out of me at all times. I want to lay on a grassy field in the shade of a great tree, not in the looming shadow of climate collapse. I want to strum a guitar, share songs and drink withmy partner and my friends, without my taxes going to incinerate innocent children halfway across the world. I want very simple things that are denied to me, because powerful people want to revel in excess.

Vocals, instruments, and drum programming by Ash.
Group vocals on tracks 1 and 3 by the members of Stryga.
Guitar solo on track 3 by Charlie Honig from North Star the Wanderer.
Additional vocals on track 4 by Ash's partner.
Purring on track 9 by Devastator. Miss you, baby girl.
Cover art by Rotting Reign.

Released May 2, 2025.