THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Tracked In Mud comes three years after London duo Cassels’ acclaimed album A Gut Feeling. Close to burnout from heavy touring, brothers Jim and Loz Beck returned to their Harringay warehouse practice space. Jim, tired of his last record’s overtures at pop culture, got very into Converge. New songs came: Heavy and weird.
Gone are the sharp-tongued character sketches, replaced with a heady cocktail of philosophy and body horror. Ditched, too, are the flirtations with mid-aughts indie rock and electro. On Tracked In Mud, we’re treated to something bigger. Wilder. More… elemental. This is a record about humanity’s disconnection from nature, after all.
When the time was right, the Becks brought in Alex Petersen — aka Nyquist Noise, aka avant-rock demiurge Vincent Vocoder Voice — to produce the new record, for the first time since their debut EP. After two weeks of isolation, the three emerged with Tracked In Mud: A soundtrack to life in the final days of an arrogant, technocratic hellscape.
Ushered in by the honking of geese, punctuated by field noise, Tracked In Mud is an album at odds with society, routine, and other man-made things. It bludgeons you with boulders, invites you to float like mist across meadows choked with weeds — presenting a thrilling vision of what heavy music can be.
FFO: Shellac, Bad Breeding, Agriculture, Thank, Unsane, Future of the Left, Modern Technology, Frauds, Converge.”