Geld

Geld from Melbourne, Australia

Geld have established themselves as the forerunners of a new breed of deranged, progressive punk and hardcore across Melbourne's teeming scene. While oft compared to the athletic determination of Equalizing Distort-era Gauze, or the motorik-flying-off-the-rails, oddball sensibility of Hawkwind, Geld’s approach to hardcore on their forthcoming album, Currency // Castration bears closer spiritual resemblance to the throbbing, crushingly direct orientation of industrial dance music. Each song is executed at the edge of the band’s compositional ability, surgically worked and reworked with the sole purpose of maximizing the percussive tension between momentum and inertia, creating a wall of sound which offers catharsis only through the direct build up and release of a maddening energy.

Since their debut LP Perfect Texture (Iron Lung Records and Static Shock Records),  and its rapid successors Soft Power EP and Beyond the Floor LP, Geld have progressively pushed their sound towards a heavier, dirge-inflected register. On C // C, Geld’s third LP—and first with Relapse Records— their miasmic excess gets a facelift. The result is a stripped bare, streamlined take upon hardcore in its purest form, reconstituted into a heavy, psychedelic dose of amphetamine thrills.

Recorded across the Southern Winter Solstice of June 2022, Currency // Castration is Geld’s most collaboratively written record to date. Although the writing process began with an initial desire to write a raging, straight-forward post-pandemic hardcore EP, this attempted exorcism of Geld’s isolation-driven fascinations quickly spilled out into a full-length’s worth of material, taking upon a fervor and mind of its own.

With Currency // Castration, Geld offer no promise of a higher purpose or resolve. Rather, they lean into dissociation, finding truth and meaning in the transcendental joy of simply escaping, surviving, existing. Their sound will find a welcome home with those who have found their purpose in the dejection of outsider music and outcast art.