Album Review: Thus Spoke Zarathustra – “I’m Done With Self Care, It’s Time for Others’ Harm” (Deathcore)

Deathcore is so back right now isn’t it? Like proper deathcore that is, not all the naff Lorna Shore knock-offs who couldn’t make an album half as good as Pain Remains in a million years. MySpace deathcore. Spinkick deathcore. Deathcore before it got addicted to symphonics, when it still looked up to its older brother metalcore—also proper, obviously—and was always happy when its Swedish cousin melodeath came to stay. Alongside the likes of Psycho-Frame and Tracheotomy, Maryland’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra have been leading the charge in the glorious revival of this stuff over the last few years, and with the release of this record they may well move to the very front both in terms of quantity and quality of output.

The fantastically titled I’m Done With Self Care, It’s Time for Others’ Harm is the band’s sophomore full-length and it arrives with the not-to-be-sniffed-at backing of Prosthetic Records, who’ve snapped them up after their previous releases helped put the now absolutely unstoppable Ephyra on the map (TSZ’s 2022 debut EP The Sun Will Never Shine Upon Us was actually Ephyra 001). Presumably with a bit of a bigger budget behind it, this one’s a fair but not excessive chunk longer than the band’s 2023 debut full-length Act Like You Don’t Know with a runtime that lands pretty much bang on the half-hour mark, and it’s definitely their best sounding record thanks no doubt to the production of Mychal Soto of snare bombing slam extraordinaires PeelingFlesh. But by and large the approach remains the same: huge, heinous breakdowns, killer Gothenburg riffs and leads, and a virtuosic and vitriolic performance from vocalist and primary songwriter Andy Reynolds.

Aside from the first 40 seconds or so of noise and FX that draw the listener into opener “GGO”, I’m Done With Self Care… plays out pretty relentlessly, with the band attaining some degree of dynamic variation mainly through their use of three guitars that allow them to add layers of melody and harmony and even a straight-up epic feel either to colour or contrast with the album’s most otherwise brutal and gruelling moments. The lack of respite is hardly a problem either; the aforementioned tight runtime serves the record well, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra are also pretty good at creating little hooks and flavours that help mark the tracks out from one another—like guest Matt McDougal of Boundaries trading off with Reynolds’ filthy gutturals in lead single “I Can’t Save You”, or the exceptional Slaughter of the Soul-isms of “Gage Lanza 2: Return of the Red Hammer”, or the direct references to The Acacia Strain’s “Bay of Pigs” in the breakdown that closes eighth track “The Difference Between You and Me is I Never Got Caught”. 

It helps too that Reynolds is quite an intelligible vocalist when he wants to be, belting out monstrous one-liners and call-outs like “Pay the price” in the aforementioned opener, or “I strike down upon you with the force of a thousand suns” before a seismic breakdown does exactly that in fifth track “The Final Blow Will Bring Blood”. Elsewhere, “I Never Believed in Magic Till My Dog Turned into a Snake” and “All I Feel is Cold” see the record get pretty close to a chorus or two—never with clean vocals, God forbid, but simple and catchy enough melodeathy type sections that the band actually revisit more than once to again help with that often elusive memorability factor.

If you wanna go a little deeper there’s also a concept to dig into: a “horror-inspired excavation of the bipolarity of self-betterment and healing with mankind’s more malevolent inclinations towards turmoil, anxiety and vengeance.” It’s about as easy to follow as it sounds—and quite how the Super Mario World sample factors into it we may never know—but it’s there if you want it and if not maybe you’ll just be happy enough with the bleak and hateful vibe of it all. Closer “Bereft of Light” sticks the landing in suitably climactic fashion, with Reynolds bellowing about destroying infinity and burning gods down and so on against a big blackened backdrop of blast beats and tremolo picking that raises the stakes to a staggering final high.

THE BOTTOM LINE

To quote a typically enlightened and eloquent Redditor: “Dude, fuckin zaratustra [sic] spake a fuckin lot dude.” This album absolutely rips; the musicianship is outstanding, the production elevates it a cut above throwback alone, and it also crucially strikes a balance of being both self-aware yet unashamed of its very obvious influences in a way that often makes it way more fun than you might otherwise expect it to be. Stick it on next to the recent Your Spirit Dies album and between them the many missteps that deathcore and metalcore took particularly in the 2010s will soon feel like little more than a bad dream.