Photo by Joshua Zucker-Pluda & Sean Stout

“This Is Not A Prayer” offers a strange form of relief. Not from the internalized hate by way of Michael Berdan being hacked up through his hellion shrieks — those remain ever-horrifying — but rather that Uniform have become an entirely different monster leading into their fifth studio album, American Standard. A personal worry coming from this longtime listener was that a band who had now figured out how to approach creating visceral industrial and noise rock cement mix in an almost mechanical output from all corners would eventually meet a natural ceiling with their formula, being swallowed into their own white noise vacuum. This next chapter in Uniform’s apocalypse expands beyond that. Now joining Berdan and guitarist Ben Greenberg are dueling drummers in touring member Michael Blume and Mike Sharp alongside Interpol bassist Brad Truax jumping into their deep delve into our deranged human experience, the resulting exploded diagram is a long-form bludgeoning lasting more than six-minutes long. Like any self-masochistic episode, seemingly endless until the pain stops, Berdan’s eats away at his insides until there is nothing left to offer up at its altar.

Uniform’s American Standard will be released August 23rd on Sacred Bones Records.