Gatherers Announce ( mutilator. ) LP

New Jersey's Gatherers (gatherersband.com) announce their new full-length album ( mutilator. ), due out November 18th via No Sleep Records. Gatherers possess all the attributes that so many bands making heavier rock strive to master and incorporate into their sound.

The five piece effortlessly blend melody with dynamic and fluid movements between guitars and drums that push the speakers to their limits, and softer reflective interludes that further highlight the incredible range of singer Rich Weinberger's vocals, pipes that might likely evoke Chino Moreno or an early career Jeremy Egnik. Today the band share the new single "gift horse", which features vocals from Geoff Rickly and arrives with an accompanying music video directed by Gatherer's own Weinberger.

"The track 'gift horse' was informed by a bass part Siddhu (Anandalingam) brought to rehearsal, which ended up becoming the intro," explains Weinberger. "We wanted the song to feel manic and anxious yet structurally coherent. At the time, I was vocally inspired by 'When Boys Telephone Girls' by Deftones and how that opening verse sort of glides over all the chaos happening. I wanted that same feeling with 'gift horse'.

We ended up recruiting Geoff Rickly to lend us his vocals. We couldn't think of anyone more appropriate than him. The video was written by myself & my friend Jordan Toussaint, and produced by my wife Kelsey. In May of 2021, I watched this preserved 16mm short by the artist Robert Breer titled 'Pat's Birthday'. At that moment, I knew that was 'the look' I wanted. The video is entirely up for interpretation, although months after finishing it I started to recognize that there is this sort of sacrificial 'rain dance' taking place. Pina Bausch was also a big inspiration for it."

Pre-Order ( mutilator. ) here.

Gatherers don't operate like most other bands. Since forming in 2011, the band has continually defied the constructs and constrictions of genre, and refused to succumb to convention.

That's something that's been amplified on this fourth full-length, ( mutilator. ) While its 11 songs are another natural progression and evolution for the five-piece, it also marks something of a turning point for the band - after releasing 2015's Quiet World and 2018's We Are Alive Beyond Repair, they put out the single "Sick, Sad Heart" in April 2019 before parting ways with their label for those past two releases.

Yet while many bands might have balked at the uncertainty that being unsigned entailed, Gatherers took it as an opportunity to make the exact album they wanted to make, not least because they weren't on anybody else's timeline. As a result, it afforded them much more creative freedom while also allowing them to build on the sounds and textures they had begun exploring on that standalone track. "This is the first time in two albums that we were really just able to take our time with it, and do and hear what we wanted on a record,'' says guitarist Anthony Gesa.

"At the same time," adds vocalist Rich Weinberger, "our mantra for this record was to not overthink anything. We spent a lot of time listening and talking to each other - asking what kind of vibe we were imagining - and I feel that was very beneficial, because it kept us all dialed in to the same headspace."

That headspace isn't far removed from the usual place that Gatherers songs take the listener - a dark, bleak world that feels like it's on the verge of a permanent night, that's watching the sun set one final time with the knowledge it's never going to rise again. While that certainly serves as an appropriate soundtrack for the dystopian world and times that we seem to currently be living in, the lyrics are actually more contemplative.

That's something of a new approach for Weinberger, who previously looked to poetry, visual art and even documentaries to aid his lyrical inspiration. While that method still played a role on these songs - he points to Charles Bukowski's poetry, the Heaven's Gate cult and the analogue horror videos of the fictional TV station Local 58 on YouTube as informing these songs - Weinberger took a more contemplative approach with these words.

Partly, that's because Gatherers also changed up their writing process. Written between April 2019 and March 2020, the band - completed by guitarist Rob Talalai, new bassist Siddhu Anandalingam and drummer Adam Cichocki - wrote in a way that accommodated Weinberger's voice more than they had before on previous records.

"His vocals have never been an afterthought," says Gesa, "but Rich has an incredible voice and we wanted to make sure we were using it to its full potential. For ...Beyond Repair, I wrote separately from the band for the most part - they'd give me ideas and I'd write to them. This time, the biggest difference is that Rich picked up a guitar and started writing vocal melodies to parts, rather than giving him finished music to write vocals to."

The result is a less a collection of conventional songs than of dark clouds of feeling and atmosphere - a set of bruised, desperate, searching songs that Weinberger refers to as "a panic attack in slow motion." That's accurate.

There's a gentle yet ominous grace to the likes of "boxcutter", "black marigolds" and "our last days, numbered like a rotary dial", and a scorching, ragged and visceral beauty to "ad nauseam, i drown", while nefarious, nihilistic shadows hover over "twelve omaha solemn certainty" and "masalette" burns up in an apocalyptic, apoplectic rage. It's proof that, while Gatherers may have moved away from the more traditional post-hardcore template of their earlier records, the swathes and swirls and layers of sound present on these songs are just as powerful.

Watch the new music video here:

Photo Credit: Kelsey Hunter Weinberger

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