Since their formation more than a decade ago, it’s been relatively easy for Uniform to seek out and ravage ugly truths to feed through their industrial noise powderkegs. Everywhere you look in this world, there is something terrifying happening, something unhinged about to blow up. Another new album, another scary societal story to tell.

This is not to say that founding members in vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist Ben Greenberg have numbed us to these realities, but the common thread spanning between 2015’s Perfect World and 2020’s Shame is a theme of a world on fire that we are damned to exist within, and they’ve become expert level at channeling it through unforgiving aggressions that beat you into a pulp with its weight. The Brooklyn band’s fifth studio album, American Standard, stands — violently and towering — alone from this narrative.

Definitively the band’s most personally exorcised demon to date, the listen is told in four epic-length chapters that pore deep into Berdan’s lifetime battle with bulimia nervosa, ensuing bouts with mental health, self-hate, the collateral damage effects to relationships, and ultimately fighting to reconfigure the mind and body connection against a monster of an illness that never truly dies. Berdan, though fully exposed by his vulnerabilities, is himself a bastion and a beacon of reignited intensity in this visceral performance alongside a huge scaled up soundscape.

The double down on drum obliterations from touring member Michael Blume and Mike Sharp alongside Interpol bassist Brad Truax push bigger ridges into Uniform’s fiery alchemy with a dramatic grandiosity enriched with extremely cine-metallic flourishes of heavy riffs, synth scourges, mourning pianos, and waning lap steel. The Molotov sound Uniform have become defined by is omnipresent, if not godlike in its powerful grip, but here, it tears not through brick buildings or cop car windshields but rather flesh and muscle, festering an ugly existence that can only be exacted through a brave admission worn on the face of a different kind of terrorizing human experience: the kind that lives inside of you.

Highlights: “American Standard”, “This Is Not a Prayer”, “Permanent Embrace”

Uniform’s American Standard is available now on Sacred Bones Records.

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