From forthcoming album ‘Currency // Castration’ out next friday, June 9 via Relapse.

Geld’s chaotic new single ‘Success’ turns a rabid gaze upon the gross accumulation of wealth as a way of life with a sense of cold pity, expounding upon the mad futility of trying to escape mortality by surrounding oneself with an excess of indulgences. Their impending new album ‘Currency // Castration’ renders the dissociation and alienation of modern living with exacting precision. It unfurls like a series of infinite reflections breaking down into fractal chaos—it becomes increasingly unclear whether one’s suffering comes from the outside world, or from the confines of one’s own skull. They’ve distilled a despairingly hellish vision of the world into a thundering crack to the temple, a naked and unsparing fusion of hardcore’s bleakest violence with metal’s ruthless strength-through-conviction. Geld have established themselves as the forerunners of a new breed of deranged, progressive punk and hardcore across Melbourne’s teeming scene. While oft compared to the athletic determination of Equalizing Distort-era Gauze, or the motorik-flying-off-the-rails, oddball sensibility of Hawkwind, Geld’s approach to hardcore on their forthcoming album, ‘Currency // Castration’ bears closer spiritual resemblance to the throbbing, crushingly direct orientation of industrial dance music. Each song is executed at the edge of the band’s compositional ability, surgically worked and reworked with the sole purpose of maximizing the percussive tension between momentum and inertia, creating a wall of sound which offers catharsis only through the direct build up and release of a maddening energy. Since their debut LP ‘Perfect Texture’ (Iron Lung Records, Static Shock Records), and its rapid successors ‘Soft Power’ EP and ‘Beyond The Floor’ LP, Geld have progressively pushed their sound towards a heavier, dirge-inflected register. On ‘C // C’, Geld’s third LP—and first with Relapse Records — their miasmic excess gets a facelift. The result is a stripped bare, streamlined take upon hardcore in its purest form, reconstituted into a heavy, psychedelic dose of amphetamine thrills. Album artwork painted by Geld’s Tom Rowley. Recorded across the Southern Winter Solstice of June 2022, ‘Currency // Castration’ is Geld’s most collaboratively written record to date. Although the writing process began with an initial desire to write a raging, straight-forward post-pandemic hardcore EP, this attempted exorcism of Geld’s isolation-driven fascinations quickly spilled out into a full-length’s worth of material, taking upon a fervor and mind of its own. With ‘Currency // Castration’, Geld offer no promise of a higher purpose or resolve. Rather, they lean into dissociation, finding truth and meaning in the transcendental joy of simply escaping, surviving, existing. Their sound will find a welcome home with those who have found their purpose in the dejection of outsider music and outcast art.

‘Success’ Lyrics:

Who will be there when you reach the end?
Will you survive without family and friends?
Does it feel good to outlast it all?
You can’t take – you can’t take it with you
Will you answer when nature calls?
What is gold when society falls?
Are you proud of your coveted spot?
Top of the pile, you won the lot
How do you win, when there’s no one else?
Will you survive in spite of yourself?
When it’s cold will you think of the past?
Or just end it all and join us at last now?
You’re insane – you can’t take it with you
Who will be there when you reach the end?
Will you survive without family and friends? Does it feel good?

Geld: Cormac Ó Síocháin (guitar), Tom Rowley (Drums), Al Smith (vocals), Pete Mclean (bass).

Geld Live Dates:

Jun 02: Sydney, NSW – Enmore Hotel (FREE)
Jun 03: Sydney, NSW – Metro Theatre
Jun 09: Northcote, VIC – Northcote Social Club (Record Release Show)
Jul 15: Brisbane, QLD – The Triffid
Jul 21: Melbourne, VIC – Bendigo Hotel
Jul 22: Frankston, VIC – Singing Bird (ALL AGES)