Two weeks into the new year, 2021’s motto thus far is pretty much, ‘2020, hold my beer’. One band whose sense of escalating tension, chaos and explosive, personal frustration speaks for all of us right now is London-based industrialised metallers Red Method, so it’s somewhat appropriate that last February’s debut album, For The Sick, has been ‘ReWorked’ with all manner of brain-battering grooves to give a new sense of urgency and range of ‘What the fuck’s going on now?’ dynamics ripe for our new age of outright fuckery.
Released today, January 15, For The Sick – ReWorks also contains one original song, Slaves To The New World Disorder, directly current events driven by an idiocy that now seems like déjà vu on steroids, and they’ve just released a stunning lyric video to (jack)boot.
Starting off with a sample of Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s now infamous quote about musicians needing to retrain – given added, worrisome weight in light of the government’s recent ‘Oh, and we’re going to make it really hard for you to play abroad’ post-Brexit policy - Slaves To The New World Disorder’s central groove accumulates ever-increasing levels of dread, not least to the downtuned, Alice In Chains-style riffs and vocals, until they give way to a retched-up diatribe courtesy of frontman Jeremy Gomez as skeletons march, bandmembers appear on floating screens, maggots are eaten, computers are smashed and buildings are set on fire amidst a host of sense-assaulting visuals.
“2020 has been a year of social unrest, injustice and natural disasters all under the cloud of the COVID-19,” says Jeremy. "Our new single is our attempt to encapsulate how it feels as the world around us collapses to the ground.”
“We are generally not a political band,” adds keyboard player (and former The Defiled member Alex ‘The AvD’ Avdis, “but we just had to take a stance and be heard on this one. We were barely scraping by as it was and for Mr. Sunak to come out and tell an Industry that generates five billion pounds a year to go retrain is just not good enough. This song is a big middle finger to these charlatans that have lost all sense of decency and have no regard for what looks bad on them or how they affect the lives of others.”
If we’re all sleepwalking into the apocalypse, Slaves To The New World Disorder is a galvanising, and groove-laden wake up call.
Red Method's For The Sick - ReWorks is available on all streaming platforms now
