A Southern drawl opens Superstition, the second album from North Carolina metalpunk upstarts Funeral Chic: “I got your melancholy, baby,” murmurs someone in the studio. And then, a chaos and a relentlessness leave no question that Funeral Chic sport the mark of the devil. Funeral Chic’s sound is a snarling summary of extreme metal in 2018, a menacing hodgepodge of blackened crust, hardcore punk, and putrid black’n’roll. This particular recipe of unholy crossover has been steadily gaining ground, thanks to Prosthetic Records and a handful of like-minded labels that have all embraced it with gusto, from Halo of Flies and Alerta Antifascista to Southern Lord. Funeral Chic is a perfect distillation, a rare beast that could just as easily open for Mayhem in a big rock club as headline an anarchist squat in Berlin. They’d probably feel more comfortable at the latter, at least politically.
Superstition opener “Rotten to the Core” is a bloody, belligerent manifesto, its frantic d-beats and off-kilter solos muddled by blasting black metal and an anthemic build that recalls Tragedy and Watain in one fetid breath. “Red Laces” serves up bruising metallic hardcore to the tune of Cursed, while “Off the Rails” is a wild-eyed pit invocation replete with gang vocals. Backed by tireless percussion, singer Dustin Carpenter is free to move all over the place—roaring, spitting, howling, and sometimes even belching up the sort of satisfying grunt that kicks off “Deep Pockets.”
Funeral Chic’s choice to sign to Prosthetic seems significant. While most of the big indie metal labels—Century Media, Nuclear Blast, Relapse—tend to take reactive approaches to their signings, Prosthetic has made a concerted effort to move in one very specific direction: crusty, fast, unabashedly political. Given that the label first rose to prominence during the metalcore boom of the early 2000s and often struggled to find its own distinctive voice, Funeral Chic’s ferocity suggests they’re getting close. (This shift mirrors Southern Lord’s own metamorphosis from doom-and-drone warehouse to purveyor of thrashy hardcore and blistering metalpunk.) Prosthetic’s roster remains a mixed lot, but Funeral Chic joins the ultra-political Dawn Ray’d, Venom Prison, and Neckbeard Deathcamp and fast-and-furious crossover crews like Dödsrit, Wildspeaker, and Trap Them.
While Funeral Chic aren’t nearly as overtly partisan as some of those labelmates, they’re not shy about their allegiances. Their motto, after all, is “VITOA (Violence Is The Only Answer),” which they have explained is their own take on “Fuck Nazis forever.” They’re vocally anti-cop, a running theme that is especially apparent on “Decorated.” Over crunching riffs streaked by Swedish death, Carpenter’s growl becomes a sneer as he rails against “Pigs of law on the prowl, like a pack of wolves/Rats that scurry, hiding from traps, selling out brothers for food.”
Funeral Chic’s impact will likely be felt in the trenches—on the road, in the underground. Their sound pulls in the best bits of multiple grime-encrusted metal and punk subgenres, the results lobbed overhead like a Molotov. They’re too ugly for the main stage, but that seems to be exactly how they like it.
