Track By Tracks: Heretic Plague - Context Is A Stumbling Corpse (2023)

1. Bleeding Stump Marathon:

This song sets the stall out for the album, it’s a fairly no nonsense gore-grind song, big hooks at the beginning and end, and plenty of blasting in between with a few nasty samples thrown in the mix. I think it’s quite a cathartic song, that sense that life can be a fucking drag sometimes but you gotta keep going… even if someone has taken you out at the knees.

2. All Eyes on the Grave:

I love the jumpy feel of this song, it doesn’t quite let you find your feet and keeps you guessing. In terms of a concept, it’s about our collective fixation as a species on our demise - apocalypse, judgment, the rapture, plague. I think maybe if we weren’t so fixated on these things we’d do a little better.

3. Skull Crawler:

Just an all-out ferocious grind track. Sometimes it’s nice to play something that is completely unrelenting, something that changes every time you try to get a hold of it. It’s a real ADHD track. This is a real throwback to the kind of songs we’d write in the early days of Beef Conspiracy - simple structures but plenty of quick changes and an absolute focus on playing as fast as possible.

4. Context is a Stumbling Corpse:

I really love the thrash edge in this song. Tom did a great job with the drums and the way it thunders along. At the risk of sounding cliched, it’s a proper head-banger. We chose this as the title track as it sums up the way a lot of people judge this type of music, the way it’s viewed with a lack of nuance - it’s just noise, it’s mean-spirited, it’s scary or evil or whatever. There doesn’t seem to be much room for context in people's opinions at the moment.

5. Bloated. Fly-Bitten. Dead:

Probably the closest we’ve ever come to writing a slamming track, it’s a big heavy slab of groove and grind, the kind of song that makes you want to break stuff. For me it’s a real stand-out track as it’s unlike anything else on the album, it’s probably the least representative of our sound but the most fun to play. The concept for the song is simple; we’re fucked.

6. Briefcase Full of Cutlery:

This was one of the first songs we wrote and Greg from Beef Conspiracy’s influence is a big part of it. Though it’s had a few updates along the way. The story behind this song is my dad gave me a briefcase to sell on eBay, and for some reason, it contained a full set of cutlery- knives, forks, spoons, serving tongs- it was a very peculiar thing. I remember talking to Greg about it and it made us laugh, the idea that somebody would feel the need to use what is effectively a ‘business bag’ to carry a dinner set. I suppose it posed the question of what exactly they were using it for. Perhaps a cannibalistic chief executive?

7. Pentangle of Broken Teeth:

This is probably my favorite song on the album, it appeals to my absolute lack of attention span. We threw everything at this song. It’s probably the most complex song I’ve been involved in writing but it’s also very fun to play. I think the song title fits nicely, the idea of creating anything from teeth is immediately pretty grotesque. I had this idea about somebody harvesting teeth and summoning some ancient beast with them.

8. Ubiquitous Gore:

You can’t have a goregrind album without there being at least one song with ‘gore’ in the title. But we felt that it’s also perhaps an overused concept - hence Ubiquitous Gore. This is very much a song of two halves. It starts out as a twitchy thrasher with really nice driving beats and nasty growls. I think it’s the only song with a consistent tempo. Then it drops into a grinding dirge, a completely different sound. We had a couple of songs like this in Beef Conspiracy. I like to add an unexpected change to the proceedings.

9. Grandpa's Hammer:

The album ends as it began, with a no holds barred grind assault. Big riffs, unrelenting brutality, and nice big hooks. This was on a demo we produced a long time back but the song itself has changed quite a lot. It originally sounded rather too much like Casket Garden by Dismember, so Tom reworked the end section which ended up sounding so much better. The title is a nod to Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Who doesn’t love a bit of blunt-force trauma to wind things up?