Growth – Release In-Depth Track By Track for New Album Under The Under Out Today via Wild Thing Records
+ Touring Nationally with Psycroptic & Rivers Of Nihil This August
Below rock bottom under the weight of truth.
Yet in facing truth there is a spark that reveals there’s more to you than your darkest place…
Melbourne progressive-death outfit Growth have released the long-awaited second chapter of their planned trilogy, Under The Under via Wild Thing Records.
Emerging with their first new music in over half a decade via the blistering, Remember Me As Fire and Forward, Further, Spirit Killer the followed it up last week with release of the albums title track ands its incredible music video.
Under The Under is 9 minute epic short film with a huge vision and very David Lynch type feel.
A progressive metal masterpiece and a video you don’t often find in this genre.
The video was Written and Directed by Nick Rackham (Growth – Bassist) Produced / Filmed / Edited / Video by Karl Steller (The Omnific, Melancolia, Gravemind, The Beautiful Monument).
Read on below as the band walk you through every song and its profound meaning.
Remember Me as Fire:
This begins where the last album ends. When you’ve hit a point below rock bottom, it’s almost impossible to perceive anything other than the centre of that. You find yourself buried under reasons why you deserve it. In doing so, you deny that there’s more to you than where you currently sit. You can spend your whole life avoiding that truth, but it creeps through every day. By facing it, you step from being the person you know into something you don’t. Something not complete, but in between. It burns. Making yourself aware of that is the first step.
Under the Under:
It’s comforting to be haunted. All that rattling of chains. By surrounding yourself with ghosts, it gives form to everything you’ve lost. They’re something more meaningful than words. Even if your physical and spiritual bodies are starved and in excruciating pain, at least you’ve got ghosts. Without them, the terrifying questions come forward: what if the dignity we give our suffering is false? What if we can still be kind, strong people without dragging that weight? What if you’re more than a collection of stories that keep yourself up at night? Uncovering that is the second step.
Slings That Shatter:
It began before you were aware of it, and before you ever could defend yourself. You didn’t have the answers as to why the pain was coming, so eventually, you learned to name yourself as the answer. The values you hold for others all seem to have a sting in the tail, pointed firmly towards yourself. Somehow, that just feels right. You know it isn’t. Beyond that dissonance is something people spend their whole lives avoiding. Digging into the shame is the third step.
Pain is Never Far Away:
One of the hardest parts about every day is never knowing what’s going to throw you sideways. Far easier to build walls, hide in comfort and numbness. Recovering was never about an absence of pain, it’s about being able to face every emotion, every memory, every experience, and not have them destroy you. What would it be like not to live in fear of memory? Healing is the fourth step.
Forward, Further, Spirit Killer:
If you want to be able to live freely, you have to kill the idea that you are made entirely of stories. Your experiences have shaped your life up until this point. But there are things you like to see in the world, in others, in dreams, that have nothing to do with those experiences. There’s also a part of yourself that you see as strong. It may not be one you apply to yourself, but it’s there, and you can only see it once you take down the idea that you are defined by the past. It’s a zero-sum game, but it’s entirely in your favour. Understanding that is the fifth step.
Death Cannot Hold Me:
You went down in a spiral. You climb back up in a spiral. Every circle you make, you see echoes of what dragged you down there in the first place. Admit to yourself that you’re seeing it from a different perspective now. Whether it’s a shield of years, a firmer grip, or both- it’s different. You may not love yourself, but you can have respect for the white-knuckled grit that’s carried you this far. Nurturing is the sixth step. It’s not the final step. What comes next is the most brutal, but most enriching part of the process. Shatter the spiral. It’s time to learn balance. We’ll hope to join you there.
Growth began in 2017 as a reflective space for brothers Tristan Barnes (guitar/bass/artwork) and Nelson Barnes (drums), and vocalist LF, later joined by Nick Rackham (bass) and Ben Boyle (guitar), to explore trauma, mental illness and grief without romanticising them. The project was never intended as catharsis for its own sake, but as a way to illustrate recovery in all its brutality. not as linear progress, but as something fractured, cyclical and deeply human.
The gap between releases has been deliberate….and necessary. Where The Smothering Arms of Mercy was written from within collapse, sickness and isolation, Under the Under exists in the far more uncomfortable space that follows: what happens when survival is no longer the question and you’re forced to confront who you are once the wreckage settles. In the bands own words, healing, is not gentle. It is an ugly process. Chaotic, disorienting and often more confronting than the pain that preceded it.
Under the Under, is an album that documents six stages of recovery – not as levels to be celebrated, but as thresholds to be endured. Across the record, Growth interrogates the dignity we attach to suffering, the comfort of identifying solely with trauma and the terrifying possibility that we might be more than the stories that have kept us alive.
Growth does not offer solutions but instead offer honesty and an invitation to sit with the questions most of us spend our lives avoiding.
Under the Under is out now via Wild Thing Records
https://orcd.co/undertheunder
Growth will be touring Australia in August as part of the epic Psycroptic & Rivers of Nihil tour
TOUR DATES
Thursday August 13: Magnet House, Perth
Friday August 14: Lion Arts, Adelaide
Saturday August 15: Max Watts, Melbourne
Friday August 21: Manning Bar, Sydney
Saturday August 22: Necrosonic Festival, Brisbane
Tickets on sale now
https://daltours.cc/psycroptic-rivers
Follow Growth
linktr.ee/growthnoise
Wild Thing Records
Linktree | Web | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Spotify | YouTube
