Pyrrhon - Exhaust - LP COLORED

CABIN FEVER: THE MAKING OF PYRRHON'S EXHAUST By Justin M. Norton PYRRHON WAS STUCK in mid-2023 after prolonged global unrest and personal changes. In 2020, their album Abscess Time arrived at the heart of the pandemic. In 2021, they went on one tour at the height of the Delta COVID wave before clubs started shutting down again. In 2022, they played a single show. In 2023, they had only three songs written for a fifth album. The band decided to shake things loose with a retreat. Armed with their instruments, psychedelic mushrooms, and a few bad movies, they rented a cabin in rural northeastern Pennsylvania in May 2023. The decision worked. The creative energy surged, and the band wrote three new songs over the weekend. “Initially, we just didn't seem to be able to strike the same intensity as past Pyrrhon records,” vocalist and lyricist Doug Moore says. However, the time in the cabin allowed the band to reconnect as musicians and friends. “It was a turning point for the record,” Moore says. “We didn't have enough material. We hadn’t spent that much time together, and it felt like we were able to rediscover who we are and feel the energy of the collaboration.” “We’d never done a creative retreat before, and it was so cool to write stuff on the spot,” guitarist Dylan DiLella says. “Writing stuff in the same room showed us that we don’t have to try as hard to create cool music. There was a lot of bashing our heads in this band, especially when trying to make this record. Going with the energy in the room helped us trust ourselves more.” Pyrrhon, which formed in New York City in 2008 when most of the band was in college, has always been classified as technical death metal for convenience. Their music, however, defies convention—even in the anything-goes world of 21st-century metal. Pyrrhon's music contains the musical prowess of Gorguts’s Obscura, the unrelenting rhythmic pummeling of Big Black, and the experimentation of free jazz. Moore’s lyrics - a combination of poetry and flash prose - are a welcome relief in an art form awash in stale cliches and genre tropes. Pyrron’s jarring and complex music - a true outlier when the band released their first album over a decade ago - requires attention and scrutiny, and demands replay. Pyrrhon’s fifth album, Exhaust, is not a concept record. However, many songs touch on where we are in 2024; people are overwhelmed and unable to catch their breath. The album was initially called “Exhaustion,” but drummer Steve Schwegler noticed recurring imagery about cars slowly degrading from overuse - an apt metaphor for an album exploring perpetual burnout. On a larger level, Exhaust is about things - machines or humans - being ground down and never recovering. It also hints at the exhaustion of staying sane in a world overrun with digital devices, social media, holograms, and artificial intelligence. “It’s about the experience of being pushed beyond your ability to sustain things,” Moore says. “We went through a pandemic, and now people act like it didn’t happen. We went through an attempted fascist insurrection, and now people act like it didn’t happen. It’s a sense of constantly juggling things and never having a handle on them. That feeling became a big part of this record and the imagery.” Pyrrhon’s songwriting process has always been democratic. On Exhaust, however, they wrote more material as a unit. In the past, one member wrote the framework of a song using a sequence of riffs or grooves. For Exhaust, Pyrrhon worked more collaboratively and wrote several songs as a group while jamming. “On the trip to Pennsylvania, we wrote as a group on the spot,” Moore says. “But even outside that, we wrote songs in our practice space. We have the same democratic principle as before, but what happened with Exhaust was that we all got better at realizing what works. It’s supposed to sound wild, but we’ve been a band for over 15 years, and the current lineup has been together for nearly a decade. The result was knowing what to do to serve the big picture.” “Exhaust sounds like a band playing together, which is tough for a technical experimental death metal band,” DiLella says. “That’s always been our goal, but we haven't achieved it until this record. It’s our tightest record, but in some ways, it's also the loosest. It’s easy to forget about the burning passion we all had when we started this band. We are all passionate music fans, and that is channeled into this band. We just have recently realized how lucky we are to have Pyrrhon.” Exhaust was recorded with longtime Pyrrhon producer Colin Marston in December 2023 at Menegroth, The Thousand Caves studios in Queens, shortly before the studio closed. The album benefits from the band members' other musical pursuits and life changes over the past four years. Moore joined the experimental black metal band Scarcity and became a software developer. DiLella joined the ascendant noise rock band Couch Slut and became a guitar teacher. Bassist Erik Malave studied library science. Schwegler finished college on the GI Bill and got an engineering job. “Our jobs and our lives changed a lot,” Moore says. “We almost had to figure out how to be a band again.” In Pyrrhon’s early days, the band often wrote about their adopted hometown of New York. Their debut album, An Excellent Servant But A Terrible Master, is, in many ways, an album about the city. In recent years, however, they have looked wider for inspiration - even to topics like American football. One of Exhaust’s standout tracks “Concrete Charlie” is loosely based on hard-hitting Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik, who exhibited CTE symptoms at the end of his life. “It’s outwardly about football but more about how a larger system used and discarded him,” Moore says. “It’s part of the American experience. These titans of sports and people lionized by American culture are turned into mulch by the end of their lives. Football is a microcosm of American life, and we lionize these men who achieve extraordinary things but are fundamentally being exploited.” A little more than a year removed from the cabin, Pyrrhon is reenergized and looking forward. “The pandemic and everything that happened honestly gave us a chance to pause for the first time since we’ve been a band,” DiLella says. “In the past, when albums were done, we started working on a new one. I’ve been reflecting on the band’s early days lately. We were kids when the band started. Now, I feel like we can work to our strengths more. I feel more confident and think the rest of the band does, too.” “I did a lot of soul-searching with Exhaust,” Moore says. “We've been through a time of great uncertainty. I tend to get into my head about this stuff. Now that our lives are more balanced, I feel it was all worth it.”