The Blackened Doom Negativity of Cattle Hammer Prepare To Release Dark Thoughts With Lights Out!

With foundations of loss and desperation, bricks of countless small rejections and a mortar of indifference…adorned in carefully sculpted cruelties, with a watchfire of self hatred blazing out into the night; so is my tower of pain and isolation built, my black edifice, my fortress and my prison. And even in the utter solitude behind these cold stone walls I am not master of myself. Even here I am a slave to the voices, speaking from the past, making their whispered incisions in my tattered, wastrel soul.

“…that’s what you’re entitled to…pain, suffering, misery…”

- CATTLE HAMMER, ‘Rotting’

Formed in the spring of 2023 by Duncan Wilkins (Fukpig/Mistress/ex-Anaal Nathrakh), Cattle Hammer is a caustic, unforgiving blend of sludge, drone, impenetrable blackness and deep rooted negative emotion. Their first outpourings of choking, bleak despair included the 71 minute, uninterrupted track ‘Methlehem’ – a declaration of just how far into the darkness they were prepared to venture. Now Cattle Hammer are primed to unleash their formidable debut full length album, an amalgamation of four of their most harrowing songs, Dark Thoughts With Lights Out…

The descent begins with ‘Gloomsower’, vocals like tortured spirits howling behind thick walls of sludge. It’s a slow, painful march, like wading through quicksand with each agonising step dragging you down a little deeper, the certainty of suffocating death a constant presence. The raw, organic sound brings a reality to the emotions expressed, creating a tangible link between the misery within and the sound without. There’s no gilded artifice, just a soporific dirge that vibrates through every cell…

There is no relief…

‘Rotting’ rises up through words of bitter judgement, carefully enunciated, before riffs like towering, quivering monoliths drag your heart down through your stomach. While clearly a distinct entity from ‘Gloomsower’, ‘Rotting’ further intensifies that doomed aura, continuing the process of entombment in misery. A deep lethargy eats away at time and you can almost see your skin wither as days bleed into weeks, months, years, empty decades between chords…

There is no mercy…

‘Watchmen, Alone’ jabs at your torpid consciousness with disorientating, disjointed bursts of sound before the black hammer descends in inescapable slow motion and a chasm of abyssal grief opens beneath you. It’s vicious, lumbering, brutish, vile and painful…

There is no hope but death…

The final disassembling of reality comes with ‘Body Puzzle’. The sheer scale of the riffs is terrifying, like being caught between colliding planets, while a voice of damnation injects fear and panic into the claustrophobic onslaught.

Dark Thoughts With Lights Out will be released by Road To Masochist on CD and vinyl on February 6th. It will leave you a weeping wreck, with your sense of self worth bleeding from your ears. It will take you beyond the point of no return. Is it cruel or cathartic? Harmful or healing? All of the above? Whatever it turns out to be for you…approach it with care.