There are two Stuffed with Hells. There’s the Stuffed with Hell identified for making tightly wound and punctiliously plotted grindcore on the albums they launch below their very own identify. And there’s the Stuffed with Hell identified for his or her means to change their signature sound to the specs of one other band’s music. On their earlier collaborative albums, you may hear them scraping and squeezing the aluminum waves of Merzbow, the freeform sludge of the Physique, and the doom metallic of Primitive Man. The prettiness of Nothing’s dirtbag shoegaze—its haziness, the defeatist riffing, the best way the songs transfer with the oblivious sway of Audrey Horne—isn’t an apparent stylistic match. However on their collaborative album, When No Birds Sang, Nothing’s strolling tempo forces Stuffed with Hell to decide on their steps rigorously, whereas Stuffed with Hell’s ferocity and ear for element corrode a few of Nothing’s pure magnificence. Like all nice collaborations, it comes throughout because the work of a single band and it’s unimaginable to think about both group making this file on their very own.

If Stuffed with Hell and Nothing sound like they see eye to eye on When No Birds Sang, it might be as a result of they had been really each other. The total ensemble—Stuffed with Hell’s Dylan Walker, Spencer Hazard, Dave Bland, and Sam DiGristine and Nothing’s Domenic Palermo and Doyle Martin—arrange store in Ocean Metropolis, Maryland, and wrote collectively in particular person, fairly than sending demos backwards and forwards. The strategy offers the album a way of focus, even because it ventures into new territory for each acts, and their shared dedication to vulnerability tenderizes even the toughest blows.

When No Birds Sang highlights the melancholy that’s at all times lurking inside each bands’ heaviness. Opener “Rose Tinted World” is structured round a thousand-foot-tall Black Sabbath riff from which Walker launches his scream; he’s persistently one in all excessive music’s most ingenious and compelling vocalists, and when phrases fail him mid-line, he transitions right into a foaming snarl. It’s a brutal opening, with suggestions whipping round its edges and a rhythm that might flip granite to powder. However when cheery samples of daytime TV start to filter in, spilling over each other of their eagerness to insist on the intense happiness of the day—“Miles and miles of sunshine,” gushes one anchor—their chipper angle recasts the track’s viciousness. Moderately than a present of power, the massive darkness feels dwarfed by the relentlessly empty face of false optimism.