Richmond's Terror Cell formed in 2019 with members of Black Matter Device, Crucial Rip, and Dismantle the Architect, and -- following a demo, an EP, and a split with Iron Price -- they'll release their first full-length, Caustic Light, this Friday (10/7) via Fisher King Records (pre-order). Across the album's nine songs, they incorporate everything from chaotic mathcore to towering sludge metal to atmospheric post-rock, and it all comes together to create one tremendous listen. Speaking about the album, guitarist/vocalist Joey Woodard says:
Writing Caustic Light was a lot of experimentation compared to our older material. I think we felt a lot of growing pains in the early writing process because we knew we wanted to do something a little different than the EP without sounding like a different band; We played around with some different tunings for guitars and added a few new pieces of gear to the equation. We all used to play in various other projects, both together and apart from each other that were all a bit more technically demanding, so the mission statement of the group from the start was to be kind of a break from that and keep things more on the simple side of things and jam on songs that we didn’t have to think too hard about. I think since none of us are involved with other projects like that anymore, we all kind of subconsciously decided to flex those muscles just a little bit more this go around for certain sections. We also went about writing this in a far more collaborative fashion. The EP and split songs were a bit more like 'hey here’s a riff, what comes next; or 'here’s half of a song, where do y’all want this to go' and more of a start to finish group writing situation, and I think that was really beneficial to the songs feeling a bit more organic. Lyrically there isn’t really a big overarching theme or anything. We’ve always been a pretty vocal lefty band, and there’s definitely still plenty of that here along with a bit more in the way of personal experiences with loss, isolation, and depression than on previous releases. I think a lot of those experiences kind of shaped what I was bringing to the table in terms of writing instrumentally, which then kind of dictated the lyrical content or at least my headspace when writing certain tracks.