Blkout annnounce " Point Of No Return"
“Dealing with the past catching up with you, moving on from it and trying to find meaning” – Scott Angel, BLKOUT vocalist.
The echoes of previous actions have a way of crawling back to haunt. On their new album, Point Of No Return, Perth’s BLKOUT lay down how they learnt this lesson the hard way by panning towards the unorthodox in their journey to widen the scope of Australian hardcore.
At the heart of the outfit’s sophomore full-length for Resist Records, these five musicians have ventured into new territory as they embrace the struggles of modern middle-class youth – from poverty and desperation to brushes with the law. Originally an outlet for the band to pay homage to New York greats like Cro-mags and Breakdown, the range of influences this band shares have seeped on to this release with diverse instrumentalisation favoured over the traditional hardcore fanfare.
“We wanted to create a record we would want to listen to,” vocalist Scott Angel explains. “All of us listen to a lot of different styles of music other than just hardcore and we wanted to produce something with a wider scope than you would normally hear on a typical hardcore record.
BLKOUT got to work on the follow-up to 2009’s Total Depravity last year. Collaborating once again with Sydney producer Lachlan Mitchell at Def Wolf Studio, who lent a hand to the No Justice No Peace 7”, experimenting was a natural progression for the band.
Joined by Tom Leithand on bass for the first time, Angel reflects on how the album helped him to purge. “I’m not trying to sing about cryptic shit I know nothing about,” he says. “I’m just writing about what I’m living in, what’s happening around me and what I see on a daily basis. The song, No Escape, I wrote about when I was having ongoing issues with the police about an accident I had that left the other party with a disability. I wasn’t at fault, but I had them on my case trying to get me to admit to something I didn’t do. It was proven I did nothing wrong in the end, but it sucks that someone is left with a permanent condition from this.”
Brutally sincere and uncompromising, Point Of No Return sets in stone that BLKOUT are willing to push the boundaries of Australian hardcore to their hilt.
"Point Of No Return" CD / LP will be released July 6 through Resist Record (AU), Six Feet Under Records (US) and Demons Run Amok (EU).
The band will be touring this month with Bitter End.
