Back in February we introduced Numbers Game, the upcoming album by Philly outfit Grocer on Grind Select, with single ‘Pick a Way‘. A song which “delve[d] into the outlandish justification and rationale surrounding toxic masculinity,” with a style as tumultuous and chaotic as the moment it described. It was part of an album which promises to explore our futile attempts to escape the calamities facing us. “The slow and unnerving discovery that we are not separate from the blights of the world,” as we put it, “and indeed most probably bear some blame as to their prevalence due to the way in which we live.”
Latest track ‘Mountain Home’ is just as scathing, its volatile sound both furious and deranged as it faces up to the fictions underpinning the Western project. “I’ve always fantasized about living an Idahoan range life,” explains lead Nicholas Rahn of the title. “And sort of romanticized in my mind Mountain Home, ID as the quintessential Manifest-Destiny-laden slice of a bygone American Dream.” But the song presents this idyllic surface as a kind of coping mechanism. Pristine lawns rolled out and neatened over bones and blood. A landscaping which comes with a double whammy of destructive costs. In trying to mask past violence, we confirm its haunting presence in everything we do, and in cultivating this comfortable ignorance we invite the future violence of nature to our door.
If no man’s land is no one’s land,
Then what’s the plan to clean it up?
Or was that dirt what always was?
The carpet pile’s wearing down and now the cat is throwing upLay em down in the lawn
The video comes complete with a trippy video by Rahn himself so check it out below:
Numbers Game is out via Grind Select on the 6th May and you can pre-order it now from the Grocer Bandcamp page.