While serious music and satirical cheekiness has been a favored combination for power violence since Spazz, Bandit ups the ante on both fronts, offering Jack McBride’s bafflingly complex riffs and Gobinda Chepang’s mechanically precise blast beats under the exasperated, desperate roar of Gene Meyer while also providing Meyer’s self-effacing, legitimately professional stand-up comedy banter between songs. As a three-piece, the musicians in this band have no place to hide. The sound that has made them such an important band for this generation of grinding and violent music blends the groove-laden grind of Pig Destroyer with the rhythm-bending post-hardcore of Drive Like Jehu and the unhinged animosity of Wound Man.
As they prepare for a brief jaunt to the UK and in anticipation of their forthcoming Siege of Self, which will be released on Chepang‘s GCBT Records, and which is the highly anticipated follow-up to their game-changing release Warsaw, Bandit have entrusted Cvlt Nation with the premiere of the video for their new single, “Juniata.” The song, which features the left-field guitar wizardry of the legendary Colin Marston, is an imagery-laced meditation on being institutionalized as a danger to oneself, an artistic dive into the bare-chested baring of the soul that Meyer does from stage at every show, reminding the band’s fans to take their mental health seriously, reminding them that they are not alone in their struggles and that a grindcore moshpit can be a place of love and vulnerability.
Filmed at GCBT Records’ life-affirming Extreme OSU Fest and set in black and white, the video manages to capture the spiritual and catastrophic effect the band has on crowds, an effect that leaves the attendee sweaty, bruised, and changed.
If you’re in the UK, be sure to catch them on their trip across the pond.
