Album Review: Anna Pest – “You and Me at the End of the Fucking World” (Technical/Progressive Deathcore)

Written by Kirk

WHAT THE FUCK IS UP, NOOB HEAVY READER? It is I, Kirk, once again here to annoy you with my thoughts and opinions about music that I hope you’re already planning on listening to because you’re cool and smart and just an all-around “with it” human being, but I don’t live my life on assumptions.  Therefore, we’re going to talk about You and Me at the End of the Fucking World, the new album from none other than Anna Pest.

If you’ve been following along (and I hope that you have), it’s been a minute since we’ve had a new album from Anna Pest. Dark Arms Reach Skyward with Bone White Fingers was released on January 1, 2021. Since that time, there has been a collaborative EP with Ashbreather’s Colin McAndew (A Moon Beneath the Cold Dead Sun), a collaborative single featuring Sterling Bidler (Snow), a split EP with Ireland’s Argento (Catgirl in the House of Evil (…and Other Stories)), and a song to raise awareness and rally support in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza (God Willing).  And if that’s not enough, April Hutchins has expanded things from a solo project to a full-fledged band, adding the aforementioned Colin McAndrew on drums and April Sada Solomon on bass. So…uh…yeah, big things are coming at you with You and Me at the End of the Fucking Word.

“So what took April & co. so long to put out a new album?”, you ask? Well, for starters, Hutchins and her new band mates tucked themselves away and worked on these songs. Even though Catgirl in the House of Evil (…and Other Stories) is technically their first collection of songs as a full band, this is their debut album together, and we all know that means something. Also, Hutchins doesn’t fuck around; if you’ve heard any of her previous releases, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It had been a little while since I’d last listened to Dark Arms Reach Skyward with Bone White Fingers, and to compare it to You and Me at the End of the Fucking World will blow your socks off and slap your mammy at the same time. Hutchins really dug deep during the writing process, drawing in more influences than on previous releases. And to top it off, the list of guest artist contributions reads off like a festival lineup: Evan Haydon-Selkirk of The Aphelion and SONDER, Hayley Elizabeth of Thotcrime, and Olive Gallop of Ice Giant to name a few.

At the heart of this album is that classic Anna Pest deathcore sound—fast, nasty, and with enough attitude to get the stink eye from your neighbor. To quote Ron Popeil: but wait, there’s more! There are hints of metalcore, mathcore, technical death metal, and even ‘00s emotional hardcore all over this record. It opens with a beautiful cacophony of ordinary, everyday sounds like that of cars driving by and police sirens, which is perhaps a gentle reminder that the end of the fucking world won’t be heralded by new reports of a giant meteor on a crash course towards Earth or a gigantic monster twisted by radiation but by an ever-growing influx of ordinary, everyday terrors. And then the guitars and drums kick in—quite literally, in fact—as Hutchins & co. lead the march towards oblivion. And then we set sail on our deathcore odyssey with “Salting Their Carbonized Precincts,” a mad dash into the jaws of oblivion.

This is where I’m going to fall in my sword a bit and admit that I lack the words to truly do this album justice. If it’s one thing people love about me, it’s the size of my…vocabulary, but I think Hutchins’ riffs have smoothed out my brain a little too much (not to mention McAndrew’s drumming and Sada Solomon’s bass work), so I’m gonna hit y’all with some highlights while I hydrate and hope that helps make my brain wrinkly again (words are hard sometimes). “Tranarchy in the UK” is absolutely bonkers and has no right to go as hard as it does. No, seriously, it slaps hard on its own, and then the vibes shift completely when Hayley of Thotcrime pops in at 4:27, and then things just pop off. But then there’s “Search for Comfort in a City of Decline,” which is A) a song title I think we can all identify with and B) my favorite song on this entire record. It sounds like something that Coheed and Cambria recorded and left sitting on the shelf before kindly giving it to Anna Pest. Seriously, combining Hutchins’ gutturals with Sada Solomo ’s clean singing, which sounds remarkably like Claudio Sanchez’s, which was a surprising but absolutely splendid treat. Seriously, this song soars, and the entire album is a similarly absolute delight.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Okay, getting back to the question I posed in paragraph number three: listen to this album and compare it to prior Anna Pest releases. It was recorded and produced at Muffin Studios by Hutchins herself, the same as all previous Anna Pest releases. So why does it sound so lush and vibrant? I realize there is a sense of urgency in the music industry to release new material.  Artists are afraid that failure to pump out new music means they’ll get lost and forgotten by the Spotify algorithm and be doomed to less than 1,000 per year forever. But what has always rung true about music since time immemorial is that taking your time and honing your craft is the way, and ten songs that have been slowly and painstakingly perfected will always be better than a hundred or even a thousand half-baked songs that have been thrown at the wall in the hopes that just one of them will stick. And then there’s the chemistry of Hutchins, McAndrew and Sada Solomon. You don’t just hear You and Me at the End of the Fucking World, you experience it.  I don’t know if I would call it a mission statement, but I will tell you this: don’t sleep on it. Because you will regret it.