Album review: Believe In Nothing – Rot

Knowing how to make listeners feel legitimately uncomfortable is an underappreciated skill in extreme music. It’s not about being heavier, weirder or more gleefully gruesome than the bands around you. Understanding the intricacies of making abrasive sound and harsh reality corkscrew listeners’ ears or cheese-grater under their skin is a subtler art. South Coast sludge collective Believe In Nothing nail it on this soul-scourging debut.

Formed in Eastbourne in 2023, a little seaside personality can be gleaned from an abstract album cover that looks like a half-rotted heart dredged up on an anchor chain. Their first show in early 2024 was an unplanned affair: a spilling of their guts at local pub The Eagle without any songs written. Finished compositions maintain that sensibility, with the metallic, bass-driven churn of Complete Desolation spewing into serrated noise-rock and stream-of-consciousness spoken word of What Would You Do? The high-octane Fist Full Of Worms is a thrilling sonic punishment, while the atmospheric Gut takes longer to digest.

Capturing both the dismal outlook of spreading social decay and the more intimate dread of psychological decomposition, the relatability of Rot’s horror-stories is the root of their power. Meth and The Children Are Cattle aren’t dark fantasy and they’re all the nastier for it. Collaborating with contemporaries in South East heavyweights Black Groove and Scottish avant-garde industrialists Mrs Frighthouse – on the nightmarishly ambient Deserts Are Glass – only increases the sense that we’re all slipping into this cesspit together.

Unfurling like the closing theme of some dystopian movie with a cruelly unhappy ending, the epic title-track offers neither respite nor any glimmer of light on the horizon. Instead, it’s blistering proof of Believe In Nothing’s unflinching gaze and willingness to interrogate the world we live in, right to its bitter end.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Full Of Hell, The Body, Thou

Rot is out now via Church Road