…But The Shadows Have Foes: A Great Variety of Morbid Symptoms (Album Premiere + Interview)

We’ve been following …But The Shadows Have Foes (BTSHF), the solo act of Illinois-based musician TN, ever since their debut album Asabiyya dropped in 2017.

Five years later, BTSHF still utilizes the epic sound of neocrust, black metal and a plethora of heavy, doom-laden sounds to embrace the concept that both hope and despair exist simultaneously amidst an atmosphere of political tensions, climate change and technological dependency. Taking its name from the works of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, BTSHF’s new album is dealing with the overwhelming feeling of mourning in the emergence, on a global scale in recent years, of various authoritarian symptoms that are ostensibly “morbid” from a progressive perspective.

Officially releasing on Friday 13th, BTSHF’s fifth album A Great Variety of Morbid Symptoms is premiering right here at DIY Conspiracy.

So, where did it all begin for …But The Shadows Have Foes? Give us a background on how the band got started.

…But The Shadows Have Foes is just me. BTSHF initially started because I had been moving around a lot and, thus, didn’t have roots anywhere (hence the cover of the first album). I had played in bands for a long time and missed writing music, so I began to record some things here and there, just little scraps of songs, by myself. The project really galvanized, though, after the 2016 election. I live in the United States and I had an unfortunately correct sense that the election was something of an inflection point for the politics of my country. It was both a break from what had come before as well as the culmination of long simmering problems and trends that had been festering, unchecked, below the surface. After the election, I began to pull all the threads of various songs I had together into something a bit more coherent, as well as write lyrics. It all came together pretty fast and the album was up on Bandcamp in March of 2017, if I recall correctly. I tend to think each BTSHF record is going to be the last one, but it’s now six years since it started and I keep finding reasons to write new ones, so here I am, with the fifth one coming out. I would love if everything in the world would stop being awful and I could stop having material to write hardcore albums about, but that doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards, sadly. 

The name of your project is obviously a reference to the legendary song “Like Weeds” by His Hero Is Gone. How would you describe your sound and what other influences do you have?

His Hero Is Gone was, when I was a kid, a band that just unlocked something in my mind. I was into pretty straight ahead thrash metal and hardcore at the time, but when I heard HHIG, it really struck a chord with me. They had a way of incorporating melody and emotion into their songs that really changed the way I think about heavy music. I think there was a lot of that in late ‘90s/early 2000s hardcore. Bands like Orchid, Portraits of Past, Pg.99, Sutek Conspiracy, Bread and Circuits, From Ashes Rise, the list goes on and on. There was a real upsurge in bands that managed to infuse the urgency and ferocity of hardcore with really nuanced and creative songwriting. All those bands were formative to me, when I was young. In particular, the band Suffering Luna has really stuck with me and I think the way they used noise and heaviness and samples has been pretty influential on BTSHF.

Contemporarily, I think we’re really in a similar golden age of creativity in heavy music. I tend to think of BTSHF as, essentially, a blackened crust or neocrust band and I’m really inspired by the current crop of bands in those genres. I’m thinking here of bands like Morrow, Dödsrit, Svalbard, Geist, Ancst, Wretched of the Earth, Myteri, Svdestada, Autarch, etc. I’m wearing a Lagrimas shirt today, and I think they’re another fantastic band in that genre.

And, at the same time, there’s some really great stuff going on with other kinds of heavy music. I’m listening to the most recent Year of No Light record as I write this. There’s so much great stuff going on in sludge metal, right now. Primitive Man, Body Void, Vile Creature, the new Mares of Thrace. I feel really privileged to get to listen to and make music right now while there’s so much great stuff going on.

What influenced you writing the new songs and what issues do you deal with lyrically? Is the band a personal vehicle, or something more political?

I think BTSHF is about the connection of the personal and the political, which I don’t think can really be separated. We humans all exist within various structures and systems which shape our behavior, define our subjectivity, constrain our action, and delineate the horizons of our identities. When I write for BTSHF, I often find some kind of point of tension in my life, like some loose end, and then follow the thread as far up and in all the different directions that it goes as I write lyrics. 

To elaborate, if I’m feeling depressed, or I’m anxious or stressed out, or I’m frustrated with work or life, or whatever, I could write a song saying “my life sucks” or “my job sucks,” and there’s nothing wrong with hardcore songs that do that. Songs like that have a long and storied tradition in hardcore, obviously. But I think what I like to do is try to situate what I’m feeling within a larger socio-political context. The new album is, in many ways, an album about mourning. The last two years have seen a million people in my country alone die in a pandemic that has killed scores around the world. We’ve been in this liminal space for years, now, watching each other die, fighting with each other, watching democracy slowly backslide into authoritarianism, feeling anxious and unraveled. So if I’m mourning that, if I’m feeling depressed, then, I try to follow that thread where it goes when I write lyrics. Why am I depressed? Well, for starters, because I live in a society that has embraced hate and death, where various elites literally profit off of and base their power on our divisions and anxieties and self-loathing, and therefore have a vested interest in keeping this dehumanizing machine churning, making us all as angry and miserable as possible so they can keep us clicking or scrolling or buying or voting for them. So much of what we feel personally, how we understand ourselves, what we dream is possible, is shaped by our environment—locally, nationally, globally—and with BTSHF lyrics I always want to try and explore those telescoping connections. If I’m feeling something, it’s not just for reasons internal to my own psyche, but because I live in a world that shapes my identity and experiences. Hopefully, by thinking about that, people question the structures and categories and power arrangements that are imposed on them, which often exist to try and profit off their misery. 

In your last album, The Subject of Pain (2020), there were samples from authors like Murray Bookchin and Émile Durkheim. Tell us about the samples on the new record. Are there any books, fiction or nonfiction, that you’d recommend your listeners to check out?

Great question. I tend to use samples thematically. So on Sparks Unknot the Flesh, which I intended to be a record about environmentalism and climate anxiety, I used some samples that specifically focused on that.

The new record follows this logic. First off, the title is a reference to the famous quote by Antonio Gramsci:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

I think this is, thematically, part of what the new record is about. As we exist in this strange, in-between space, the pandemic still ostensibly going even as people are trying to move on from it, where liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism and our various institutions seem to be falling apart, what sorts of horrors fill the void? So, for example, the last song features some poets reading their work. There’s a sample of Derek Walcott reading his poem Sea Canes, about mourning and even refusing to accept the deaths of people you care about, and Ilya Kaminski reading We Lived Happily During the War, about life going on in the midst of atrocity. I had actually finished the record before the war in Ukraine started, and people were sharing that poem widely, and it obviously applies to that topic, but I had actually used it because it’s part of a book by Kaminski called Deaf Republic about the country sliding into authoritarianism, with resistance to oppression gradually building among the populace. 

As for books I’d recommend, the album is largely inspired by a lot of what I’ve been reading and thinking about lately. Nancy Faser’s book The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, which also pulls its title from the Gramsci quote I mentioned, was influential on my thinking for it. A number of other books that I’ve read recently which have factored into my thinking for the last few records include: 

• Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber
• How to Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell
• The Collapse of Western Civilization by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway 
• The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser
• Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tüfekçi
• Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor
• Down Girl by Kate Manne
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• The Precariat by Guy Standing
• The Shame Machine and Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil

Tell us about the artwork on your records. Is it the same mountain area in all the photos?

Ha! No, it’s not. Honestly, it started because I wanted to do the first record for as cheap as possible, and so I just used a picture I took of an uprooted tree. Like I mentioned, a lot of the theme of the first record is that feeling of rootlessness, so it seemed appropriate. Also, there’s a strong environmentalist underpinning to BTSHF, so pictures of nature just seemed to make sense. The pictures are from all over, though. I like to hike and wander in the woods a lot, so they actually are from a variety of places I’ve been in the last six years. Washington, British Columbia, the Smoky Mountains, Colorado, Illinois. I take lots of pictures when I go hiking and then, when it’s time to pick artwork, I just look at what I’ve taken in the last year and ask myself what seems to capture the right mood. 

You have a blog called Revisionist Western, reviewing heavy music from all around the world. What’s your personal motivation for writing about music and what are your favorite releases of 2022 so far?

With Revisionist Western, I mostly want to champion releases I don’t see getting discussed elsewhere. Also, given that I’m into some music, like the whole neocrust scene, that I don’t think tends to get a lot of press in the first place, I like to have a space to rave about some of those bands. I’ve recently reviewed some great crust albums by Mist of Doom, Screwed, and Dark Circles, for example.

Aside from those albums, for 2022 releases I’ve liked so far, I would definitely highlight the Mares of Thrace record, which I mentioned above. Celeste, E-L-R, Morrow, Venom Prison, Toundra, Autarch, 40 Watt Sun, Tanya Tagaq, and Helpless have all put out stuff I like so far this year. I’m really excited about the Ethel Cain record which is coming out soon. The singles off of it have been great. 

Which aspects of hardcore punk culture do you feel are most impactful on today’s society and what impacts do you think the Covid pandemic had on your local scene? What changes are you seeing taking place around you?

The pandemic definitely affected the local music scene, but it seems to be clawing back a bit. The venues where I live got creative in a variety of ways, including doing livestreams and things like that, and all seem to have survived, which is good. 

The thing that I always think is most important about hardcore punk is the degree to which it’s a collective, DIY, grassroots phenomenon. The way we get through the problems we’re facing as a world, I would argue, is local organizing, mutual aid, and helping and meeting people where they are. There’s a reason why so many effective activists have come out of the hardcore scene: they learn the exact skills an organizer needs to make change through participation in that community. I hope people in the various hardcore scenes around the world realize the power they have. When you have social networks that allow you to spread messages, mobilize people, raise money, etc., you have power. 

Do you often play with black metal bands and how do you feel about the questionable or overt far-right politics of some of the bands? I think that even some of those more famous Cascadian Black Metal bands are not that safe anymore.

Well, since it’s just me, BTSHF doesn’t play shows, but I would hope it’s obvious I’m vehemently against right-wing politics based on the lyrics on the albums.

Having said that, I think it’s important to try and understand why there’s been a rise in authoritarianism specifically, and right-wing politics more broadly, in my country, as well as around the world. I genuinely believe that upsurges of far-right politics are often a symptom of something larger, something I’m often trying to get at in BTSHF lyrics, namely that we have an inhuman world in which people feel disempowered and isolated. Don’t get me wrong—some people turn to hateful politics because they’re terrible people, but I think a lot of people turn to hate or authoritarianism as a way to try to defend or inoculate themselves against these feelings and provide identity and clarity in a difficult, confusing world. Hate is a drug. It’s a temporary solution to long-term problems. If you feel rootless and isolated and miserable, hate gives you a rush of power and meaning and identity that staves off those feelings. You feel a greater sense of purpose, you feel connected to others who share that hate, you feel tough, you feel unbound by someone else’s rules. But you haven’t actually changed anything. You’ve just offloaded your misery onto a target that doesn’t have anything to do with it, like women or nonwhite people or immigrants or LGBTQIA+ people or whoever, instead of turning it towards the actual things disempowering and isolating you. So you go on social media and pick a fight with someone and you feel tough for a few minutes, but pretty soon you’re back on social media looking for someone else to yell at so you can get that hit again, and it doesn’t occur to you that the thing that’s making you miserable is the tech company who has created an algorithm designed to keep you coming back for more and more outrage and conflict because they know it drives engagement. You turn on a cable news show and some guy yells about all the people you’re supposed to hate and who you’re supposed to vote for and you feel good for a second, but those politicians and pundits are mostly interested in keeping you mad at people who aren’t them, not actually solving any of your problems. So rather than giving us things which would improve our lives-  better healthcare, higher pay, more stability, affordable housing, jobs with dignity, validation for our identities, any of the things that would actually benefit people—we’re sold anger and hate and division over and over again. I talk about this explicitly in the song “XLI” on the new record. The upsurge in far-right politics is one of those “morbid symptoms” that Gramsci warned us would appear when the old world dies. When things fall apart, people look for others to blame and for easy answers, and the powerful will do everything they can to profit off of that while keeping us fighting among ourselves rather than uniting to fight them.

What is your vision of the general state of affairs, the DIY punk scene and the world at the moment? Are the people in the DIY punk / crust / metal scene in the US talking about the ongoing war in Ukraine?

I’m not on social media much, so I can’t speak too authoritatively on what the response has been, but I’ve seen a few benefit albums and shows for Ukraine. This goes back, I think, to what I was saying about hoping that music communities realize they have some power. The authoritarian playbook is to keep people isolated and confused. Music scenes, at their best, are the opposite of that: a vast web of resources and community and connections that stretch across geographic and cultural differences. 

Thank you so much, anything else to add?

Nope! These were great questions. Thanks for the work you do documenting awesome music.

Source: diyconspiracy.net