The title of Gylt’s new EP is lifted from a line in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. My familiarity with Fyodor begins and ends with a high school reading of Crime and Punishment some 20 years ago, but this 11-minute onslaught of thorny, emotionally raw music provides all of the context necessary to understand those nearly 150-year-old words. The prevailing sentiment of In 1,000 Agonies, I Exist is not “celebratory,” per se, but its pummeling desperation offers more than fleeting escape.
Gylt’s previous releases, all compiled on last June’s I Will Commit a Holy Crime: Tandem, had the lean, driving hallmarks of classic SoCal hardcore. 1,000 Agonies maintains those essential qualities of pissed-off attitudes and economical composition while also fleshing out Gylt’s idiosyncrasies into something starting to resemble a signature sound. Despite a heavier reliance on spartan d-beat templates, the band’s early material often spiraled into brief moments of noodly abstraction, courtesy of wild guitar spasms that owe more to Dr. Know than Greg Ginn or Pat Smear. That approach added character, but it also tended to disrupt and muddy up their sound at its most breakneck speeds. The sludgier, more adventurous 1,000 Agonies plays to the band’s strengths.
Working primarily in a 90-seconds-or-less format, Gylt maximize their impact by barreling through one volatile movement after another—who can say if anything actually constitutes a verse or chorus. The EP peaks in its middle with two songs, “Pentiment” and “Wrought/Rot,” which both begin with fast-paced fakeouts that serve as pulse-quickeners and confirm that, no matter what comes next, Gylt are still a hardcore band. After 10 or 15 seconds, though, they sound more like a punk-adjacent sludge metal band, or at least like one of the many crust-punk bands that ended up pivoting to slower tempos. The back half of “Wrought/Rot,” in particular, embodies the “when they bring back the nasty riff but slower” meme in a way that’s refreshingly divorced from the bro-iest strains of hardcore built on that reliable formula. Gylt don’t do breakdowns in the traditional sense. 1,000 Agonies’ near-constant pace-shifts never feel pre-ordained; the songs flow as they need to, in service of catharsis rather than a drooling anticipation of mosh pit moments.
Vocalist and lyricist Iphigenia is the core of this unpredictable maelstrom with a guttural delivery that never dips below 11, save for a perfectly timed bratty aside on opener “Bone Rake.” The lyrics throughout the EP juggle ferocity and vulnerability in a way that mirrors the music’s seamless transitions. She invokes the personal (“Watch me wither away/While you get undressed” on “Pentiment”) as much as the political (“Masked men don’t comply” on “Intimidated”), but there’s no separation between the two. When Iphigenia bellows, “War: It does not change/Screwing, dying” on the closing track, the overarching theme snaps into focus. Minimal research informs me that The Brothers Karamazov’s Dmitri, while wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his father, finally finds peace of mind after years of tumult, declaring: “In thousands of agonies—I exist!” On this EP, Gylt harness the weird strain of freedom that defiantly blooms during desperate times.
