Slithering up from the bone rich earth comes LA's Karst, a venomous new organism, learned in the ways of old school death and skilled in the use of modern sonic devices of devastation and torture. Gnostic grinders like Discordance Axis have sharpened their claws, while the surface-weary Assück has painted them with arcane symbols in a ritual to forestall the corruption of the upper world. With crust covered gums and fur matted with scented mud and wax, they are the feral harbinger of a new age, liberated from the hollowing sickness of the modern world, bursting forth from fetid flesh like an itinerant worm newly free of its decaying host. The opening and title-track of Karst's EP Genesis of Nervous Decay, pries open the seal on the ancient pithos jar, unleashing a flood of billowing blast-beats and sling-shot riffs all firing in orbit around collapsing grooves like asteroids caught in the grips of a black hole. The crushing compress and gorilla-girth charge of "Panic Resin" will shove you into a secluded wading pool of despair, where you will be forced to bear witness as time accelerates in your reflection and you waste away to dust before your very own eyes. "The Cusp of Process" matches the feeling of fleeing through a thorny brush to escape some watching, passive horror, that could bridge the distance you've placed between you and it in a single, dispassionate bound. The deep, pungent, miasmic exhaust of "Anxiety Birthed" has the same mantle-ward pull of a Hooded Menace track but delivered with the restless, carnivorous prowl of Assück. And lastly, "Egress and Onward" winds down the affair with sparse, measuredly post-rock strings, hinting at a reprieve from the madness of the proceedings tracks… or is it a prelude to a new nightmare?
I was so excited about this short but bitterly sweet album that I reached out to Karst via email with a few questions hoping for some context and insight into their latest creation. And boy did they deliver! You can check out their responses below (edited slightly for clarity):
Who are some of your influences with in the world of grindcore? I'm hearing a lot of different stuff on your record and I want to hear it from the ghoul's mouth where it's all coming from.
Grindcore has definitely played a huge role in the development of our sound. Karst was established from the remnants of our old grindcore band Fuck White God, but we really wanted to approach Karst with more death metal and crust influences.
We can confidently say that there are a few specific huge grind influences, mainly Napalm Death, Assück, and Discordance Axis. Napalm Death really proved to us that you do not need to confine yourself to one genre and implementing different aspects of extreme metal is a complimentary possibility. Albums like Harmony Corruption, Fear, Emptiness, Despair, and Diatribes (90s weird logo era Napalm Death) were some of the albums that we are confident have some influence on us, but we have not confined ourselves to any one kind of sound.
Assück is simply the best of the best when it comes to death grind, and all the founding members of Karst are huge fans, because we started as a band full of punks that listened to a lot grind and crust. Anticapital and Misery Index really retain that punk ethos and approach, which we wanted to emulate, but also have some killer death metal grooves and crushing blasts and d-beats. They made a historical and memorable mark on the grind, crust, and death scenes with 15 minute EP’s, which we thought was so admirable and have inspired our own sound.
Lastly, Discordance Axis was a band we aspired to technically, but mostly aesthetically. They played a face-melting technical approach to grind, with vicious precision and speed, and we really looked up them aesthetically. They strayed away from typical extreme metal imagery and subject material (like drippy logos, gore focused imagery and lyrics), even though these are things we are really drawn. From their strangely fitting cover to The Inalienable Dreamless to their slightly obscure and poetic lyrics, they’ve played a huge part in our formative year and approach to death metal.
Why is so much of the theming of the album focused on Mermithids? Which as far as I can tell are a kind of parasite that primarily infects insects and other invertebrates.
The Mermithidae are a parasitic nematode that simply feed on the insides of other animals until they are no longer of use to them, and eventually burst from their host and go on to reproduce and restart their life cycle. We thought it would make for a fitting metaphor and representation of anxiety and depression. The EP itself is pretty much a concept album and piece of lore in a universe we want to establish for our lyrical content.
We use the mermithid in our EP as a characterization of struggles with mental health and mental illness like anxiety and depression. The mermithid acts like a figurative vessel to conveying a person’s struggle with mental illness because those kind of struggles can be very difficult to explain and understand. So we just wrote our version of a horror story, characterizing anxiety and depression as an outside force and villain (the mermithid), that simply eats you from the inside and doesn’t stop until you’re either dead or feel like you’ve gone mad, which is the sad reality of mental illness in some cases.
I guess in conclusion, the biology and life cycle of the mermithidae in real life seemed fitting to represent anxiety and depression, and to help expose how terrifying mental illness can really be. Also just like the mermithid does in real life, mental illness can target anyone, whether it be hereditary, from traumatic experiences, or struggling with life in general, everyone has a pretty high chance of dealing with some kind of mental health struggle or becoming victim to mental illness, which is also pretty fucking scary.
Can you shed some light on the title, Genesis of Nervous Decay? It feels very specific to what you are doing and not just a "cool" metal title.
The title can be interpreted as literally as possible: the EP tells the story of the beginning of someone’s mental demise. Just read the lyrics and you can see it follows a story from a beginning to an interpretive ending, of a random person victimized by mental illness. Life and nature can be very real and severe, and people suffer every day.
We are against the glamorization of mental illness that can be prevalent in metal and pop culture, but metal also succeeds at being brutally honest and relentless about these realities. Reality is truly fucked, and there are so many issues and subjects to write about, and we chose to write about something we are familiar with and can possibly help raise awareness for, which for us is “cool” and “metal” in itself!
We just wanted a title that was true to what we were trying to express plain and simple, and it just sounded right when we thought of it! Titles can be tricky but we are happy with The Genesis of Nervous Decay. You don’t want to bother yourself too much over choosing a title. Just go with what feels appropriate!
Grab a copy of Genesis of Nervous Decay from Karst's Bandcamp here.
