Four years and at least one psilocybin-laced team building exercise later New York-based experimental death metal quartet PYRRHON reflect on the instinct of survival and the necessary denial involved in coping with the myriad traumas associated with civilizations collapse as their fifth full-length album comes crashing down upon us in a gasping heap. ‘Exhaust‘ envisions all batteries sapped, resources dried and burning at the tank level as the last fumes of a crumbling empire’s populace remain desperate to view their lives with feigned normalcy. Accepting the usual deception from the powers that be no matter how brazen, shiftlessly opportunistic they’ve become the complete loss of control felt bears no relief, only further exploitation ’til death. That is to say that the frustration and collapse of noise rock, mathcore and technical death metal abstraction the band’ve long developed can now be found wilding out a bit further from solid ground upon return. Their oeuvre expands and contracts into brilliant points of focus and dissociation here thanks to an intensified union, feeling freshened in its mania without losing what they’ve built from a decade and a half’s worth of hashing it out.

Pyrrhon formed back in 2008 notably sharing a rhythm section with folks from Imperial Triumphant at one time or another in their first couple of incarnations. Though their first EP (‘Fever Kingdom‘, 2009) didn’t necessarily explode out the gates you’ll find their most classicist tendencies applied to a pretty clean skill level and obvious college-era bent on philosophic lyricism. The leap they’d made from that first CD-r to their debut full-length (‘An Excellent Servant but a Terrible Master‘, 2011) was clearly a step out of bounds, particularly in terms of the abstract noise guitar techniques used by guitarist Dylan DiLella (Couch Slut) and the reactive socio-political frustration of their lyrics. At the time bands like Flourishing and Baring Teeth were chucking out the mold in a similar way, perhaps taking cues from albums like ‘Obscura‘, but with very different taste-specific identities forged. In these folks’ case their interest in grimy noise rock bass tones and warped flesh-toned guitar sounds became a big part of their own signature then and there, a miserable spectacle of atmosphere and gnarled rhythms that only intensified from album to album as they’d soon sign on to Relapse Records roster.

Pyrrhon‘s second LP (‘The Mother of Virtues‘, 2014) would be my main point of entry as a fan who’d been conscious of their uprising but, as you’ll see on my Best of the Year list for 2014, they’d only gotten special mention for the sake of that being a watershed year for my own taste at the time. In the past I’ve stumbled in both overconfident and awkward attempts to describe the value of their noisome atmospheric abstraction and its suffering gloom but at this point I’d say that album has long been a hit with me for the same reason Reveal‘s ‘Flystrips‘ has, they’ve got a classic noise rock referenced desperation and clangor built into their otherwise niche extreme metal fueled movements. Of course one could point to mathcore and such, too, as a point of reference as their discography sallied forth but there is a malevolent and/or depressive swing to this band’s movement that is not as rigid or caustic, a feature typically attributed to original drummer Alex Cohen‘s (ex-Imperial Triumphant) interest in jazz fusion and such at the time.

So, why revise my own experiences and go back through this band’s bio for a quasi third draft? There’ll be no better way to engage with ‘Exhaust‘ than getting a full-fledged refresher on where they’ve been and how their Willowtip Records arc is shaping up than recalling that point in time ten years ago when there was nothing else like this band and how it’d fueled a resurging obsession with the idea of noise rock influences applied to extreme metal. That’d been the draw for me then and that interest still sustains with similar enthusiasm today. Pyrrhon‘s third and fourth albums continued down that jagged path with bigger, louder, and more nutso-smasho movement in their work as they brought drummer Steve Schwegler (Seputus, Weeping Sores) into the fold. The burnt cathedral of room noise and psychedelic swerve available to ‘Abscess Time‘ (2020) continues to spike in mind as one of my favorite Colin Marston-guided recordings, particularly loving the dizzied technical abandon of that record and increasingly distraught temperament of vocalist Doug Moore (Glorious Depravity) upon reviewing it. All of this’d lead up to some reasonable hype and general expectations for what ‘Exhaust‘ might be.

The screaming gears of the machine and the overheated pins that secure them popping out of their sockets greets us as “Not Going to Mars” leads with wrathful mecha-noise in molten drain, grinding out as unpredictive as possible a freakout they can manage off the dome. Packed with ever-shifting riff changes and a scorched landscape of effects stomping and interruptive force this opener is as much a flex as it is a showcase of expression condensed into moments quick and dirty enough to present constantly turning on a dime. In simpler terms they’ve opened the album with a beasting, unpredictable rush-and-retracted statements which only sort of hint at all they’ve packed into this release. The sensation is that of a too-quick slideshow which only becomes more horrified with every fast-flashing change of scenery. As a technical death metal fan this all reads as wildly abstract and not-so directly related to said sub-genre foundation but as someone who’d grown up with various shades of mathcore, grindcore, and such developing in real time I can appreciate just how much is happening second by second on this opener and… that sensation keeps on bewildering the skull for the next ~34 additional minutes of ‘Exhaust‘.

The spastic noise-grinding pump of “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce” again carries this ‘You Fail Me‘-era deathgrinding whip-and-chunk to it that feels energetic, emergent enough within its outlandish improvised feeling strike into a lead in the middle, a quickly cut structure more-or-less repeating twice in two minutes. The first three songs more-or-less build a narrative space within their screaming and scrambling approach though there isn’t much for the tech-death head to bite into just yet as we get our first hit of noise rock inspired frustration on “The Greatest City on Earth”, featuring some declarative vocal bits that’ll be expanded upon later on with the Schwegler-flexing clamor of “Out of Gas” and ringing-low dread jam of “Last Gasp” where we find very satisfying point of collapse flexed to a psychotic extreme. These tended to be my favorite parts of the album because they’d felt like Pyrrhon were doing the thing that’d made me a fan a decade ago but now pushing even further into it to the point of transformation, those peripherally set niche inspirations now becoming vital parts of their unique approach. By all accounts this is the product of developing songs together in the moment rather than building upon pre-built ideas, allowing their whole deal to author on the spot. What other tech-death adjacent band has any sort of viably swinging chemistry on record in this sense? Whatever you come up with it is a short list either way.

“Luck of the Draw” is where Moore‘s frantic, faces-pressing-through-walls set vocals begin to reach for brutal lows slightly more often as the next several songs (or, “Concrete Charlie” and “Hell Medicine”) grow angrier, harsher in their growled-at reactivity. I particularly enjoyed the scrambled, cutting vaunt of “Concrete Charlie” and its step through a variety of vocal techniques in its first two minutes, feeling like this’d have been the shocker second single to showcase the wild transformation of the band herein if they’d not dropped the album all at once. There isn’t an abrupt tonal shift as the album drains of its last few pieces on Side B but you should be able to grasp the tonal shift as it ebbs, and I’d felt songs like “Last Gasp” are meant to feel like a dire bleeding-out of the protagonists will.

The gist of it is that the more time I’d spent with ‘Exhaust‘ and its many ever-converging aspects the more entertained I was, though I don’t think the more traditional left-brained spectrum of tech-death interested folks will appreciate the level at which Pyrrhon have abstracted, mashed, and fused forms herein. They’ve gone far-out with it and not necessarily with the Zorn-like grind deal that has been done so much at this point, instead this one should definitely peck at the skull of peak mathcore heads first, at least from my point of view. I’d found the whole of the experience easy to repeat as a ride that is brain-blurring in the moment, familiar upon return but with plenty of unexpected turns taken throughout that I’d almost need another month just to gain any reasonable familiarity with its swarming, anxietous press. A unique and redeeming abstract death metal experience which feels essential here and now. A high recommendation.

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