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Ipecac Recordings announce the new and second album from the trans-atlantic group Split Cranium - which features Faith Coloccia (Mamiffer, Mara), Aaron Turner (Mammifer, Sumac, Old Man Gloom and so much more), Nate Newton (Converge, Doomriders, Old Man Gloom), Tomi Leppänen (Circle, K-X- P) and Jussi Lehtisalo (Circle) - entitled I'm The Devil and I'm Ok, to be released across all formats on the 25th May.

The self-titled debut was an exhilerating barrage of super-charged hardcore, replete with blitzkrieg riffing, stampeding pace, and gravel-throated ire, a ferocious homage to Nordic d-beat masters Terveet Kädet and Anti Cimex. Six years later, their second album, I'm The Devi and I'm Ok comparitively explores the contrasts of melody and dissonance, opening the album with Popol Vuh-inspired keyboards by Faith Coloccia that saturate the ruthless reinterpretation of the Discharge template on "Evil Hands". The contrasting breaths of sublime ambience serve to highlight the savagery abetted by bassist Nate Newton and Tomi Leppänen (Circle, K-X- P), making I'm The Devil and I'm Ok simultaneously more sonically rounded and more visceral and vicious.

"We wanted to make a record that was less straightforward than the first one," Turner says of their method. "Jussi loves melody and I love dissonance and noise, so that is probably the healthy creative contrast that made this record what it is."

While Split Cranium continues to be driven by the blazing guitar malaise of Lehtisalo and the harrowing bellows of Turner, the melodic counterpoint provided by Newton on "Wet Shadow", the ethereal vocals summoned by Coloccia on "Ingurgitated Liquids" and "Death Bed – The Yellow Room", and the squalls of white noise on "Whirling Dusk" are a but a few of the components that knock I'm The Devil and I'm Ok off the axis of traditional d-beat hardcore.

Some of the strongest records in the anarcho-punk canon have figured out ways to inject melody or push extremes without diffusing their punch or diminishing their hooks. Split Cranium retains the principal components of speed and vitriol while expanding their frequency spectrum into realms of both beauty and sheer ugliness, making I'm The Devil and I'm Ok a white-knuckle mind-melter in a realm of sterile imitations.

“For over two decades, Aaron Turner has been on the front lines of intelligent forward-thinking heavy music” - Revolver

“Defiantly experimental and exploratory, full of dissonant bursts of sludge, quick punches of math, desert-wandering Morricone metal, throbbing Swans-ian slamming and sections opened up for improvisation." - Rolling Stone

On Keiji Haino & SUMAC's early 2018 album American Dollar Bill...:
"One of the year's best rock records, it is a five-track behemoth that includes quarter-hour tessellations of tortured guitar and explosive drums. Above the melee, Haino howls tormented poetry, grappling as he always does with complex feelings that seem just beyond clear expression." - NPR


On September 21st, SUMAC - the trio of Aaron Turner (ISIS, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer), Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists, Erosion), and Brian Cook (Russian Circles) - will be releasing new album Love In Shadow. Earlier this year, SUMAC released their acclaimed collaborative effort with legendary Japanese artist Keiji Haino, American Dollar Bill - Keep Facing Sideways, You're Too Hideous To Look At Face On.

Love In Shadow is a brutalizing dive into love and all its raw emotions, and SUMAC are always searching for a new approaches and challenges. Turner’s nimble songwriting combusted with the road-honed intuition and technical prowess of his bandmates results in a sound that is at once complex and primal. Riffs lurch into psychotropic scrapes, drum fills are distended and mangled, and Turner’s voice carries the weight of a strife that is colossal in both volume and austerity.

Recorded live in a single room at Robert Lang Studios in Washington by Kurt Ballou (Converge), who later mixed the album at his own studio God City, Love In Shadow ushers in a more improvisational songwriting approach for SUMAC - a sea change galvanized by their collaboration with Haino. Finding comfort in the negative spaces within each track’s borderland was the trio’s primary goal in writing the four massive tracks comprising Love In Shadow.

On the album's emotional motif, Turner says: “Since many of the surface level aspects of our being are often used as divisive tools to separate/alienate us from one another, the intent here is reveal that at our base level all humans desire and need to be loved and accepted for who they are, for just being.”