Album review: Hidden Mothers – Erosion/Avulsion

Black metal, post-hardcore, a touch of shoegaze and a whole lotta hurt, Hidden Mothers deliver quite the turbulent brew. Having been swirling around the British underground for what feels like an age, the Sheffield quartet show that patience is a virtue on their long-promised debut, and it’s an album on which they frequently stir up more poignant emotional notes and strike greater depths than many operating in similar fields.

This comes down largely to not hiding its vulnerabilities under an avalanche of volume and aggression. Instead, the black metal elements, those moments where they roar forth with everything they’ve got, are used as punctuation to the larger motifs drawn more from melody and a masterful grip on how to wallow in quieter, slower moments. So it is that opener Defanged comes straight in with a blast, a slashing riff and jugular-swelling vocals, but quickly veers off into a jangly mid-section and clean vocal closer to Alexisonfire than Absu.

Death Curl does it the other way round, with its glistening intro giving way to a sludgy, haunting breakdown, but from here things become less well-trodden. Still Sickness is all ocean-sized chords and layers of atmospheric vocal, while The Grey finds a gently-picked intro slowly swirling into full-on post-hardcore catharsis.

On Grandfather, everything is stripped back to just a delicate guitar and even more delicate, cracking vocal, before the chunky intro of Violet Sun fades into an equally raw dark night of the soul, asking ‘What if I can’t drown the demon that’s in me?’ Again, though there’s blackgaze building blocks, what you actually get is something with an equal side of confessional, old-style emo.

It’s refreshing in both its honesty and its creativity. Often, this stuff can be made to sound easy, a load of delay and chorus and blasting acting as a way to an end result without having to properly write something meaningful. On Erosion/Avulsion, Hidden Mothers show how to do it with every detail accounted for, to often devastating effect.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Deafheaven, Underdark, Touché Amoré

Erosion/Avulsion is out now via Church Road