Gaza

Formed in Salt Lake City, UT in 2004, Gaza's music could not be farther in spirit from the band's hometown's Mormon heritage. For the past eight years, the bandmembers' mutated form of hardcore and grind—full of dissonant chords and pummeling drums and a monstrous frontman growling and screaming into the mic with nary a conventional blast or breakdown in sight—has spewed bile laced with black humor at the ugliness they find around them. Gaza's anger, often directed at social and civic injustice, is politics made personal. One of the band's most consistent targets has been institutionalized religion, the perpetuation of which guitarist Mike Mason casts as a sort of cultural atavism.

"Religion was our first attempt as a species to explain everything from cosmology to morality," Mason says. "It also happens to be our worst attempt at doing all of these things."

Gaza is touring in advance of its third full-length album, No Absolutes in Human Suffering, due out July 31. It was recorded with Kurt Ballou of Converge, a band whose influence is easily recognizable in Gaza's frantic, discordant guitar riffs and unpredictable song structures. But that unpredictability also lends itself to a broader range of inspiration. In addition to the likes of Converge and fellow luminaries Coalesce and Botch, Mike Mason cites smoky chanteuse Jesse Sykes and slowcore pioneer Mark Kozelek (of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon). The latter influences come through in fascinating ways, from the particularly Kozelek-like extended outro of "Hospital Fat Bags" from 2006's I Don't Care Where I Go When I Die to the quartet of atmospheric interludes that offer necessary respite from the chaos of 2009's He Is Never Coming Back.

Mason assures that this unholy union lives on in Gaza's new material: "It's heavier, faster, darker and more depressing, but it also runs through the moments where the clouds part and you look up and realize nothing and no one is behind them, and that you're more than fine with the freedom that brings."