Grindcore, and especially it's more punk leaning side, sometimes under the powerviolence umbrella, has been known to make short and fast songs. That's why bands like The HIRS Collective can afford to make a third compilation album of 100 songs. Even with their EPs and their only other full length, 2018's Friends. Lovers. Favorites., the modus operandi was still short fast songs and rarely you'd get a release over 20 minutes. So, that's the first thing to notice about We're Still Here is that this is the first non-compilation release to break the 30-minutes mark. And while the gist of the tracklist is still under two minutes, it has a whooping two songs longer than 3 minutes. That alone should be a pretty big challenge for a "band" where brevity is the name of the game.
There's a reason why I put band in quotation marks there. And a reason why I refrained from adding any kind of lineup to the band. Because I'm not sure if there's any. The HIRS Collective are more of a rotating cast of musicians, where I have no idea how much each of them have contributed throughout the project's existence. So to call this album collaborative it's an understatement, even without looking at the tracklist. But looking at the tracklist, and: oh boy! Every song is a collaboration with somebody in the scene, sometimes multiple featured artists, sometimes an entire band credited (though it's likely not all of them performed on the track). Friends. Lovers. Favorites. was similarly collaborative, but collaborations were only a sizeable chunk of the album's tracklist, not the entirety. Some of the artists that performed on Friends. Lovers. Favorites. are here on We're Still Here too, like Garbage's Shirley Manson and Soul Glo's Pierce Jordan.
So how does an album that boasts features from Thou, Melt-Banana, Touché Amoré, La Dispute, My Chemical Romance, Converge, Full Of Hell, and The Body sound? Noisy, mad, intense. And that's me trying not to go overboard with the namedrops. Not too big of a surprise there. Also not a surprise that the rotating guests create a bit of a disjointed inconsistent feeling, where the short form often doesn't leave the songs to be fully fleshed out. That's the bad. Now for the good, I enjoy that the band doesn't overtly rely on the powerviolence part of their sound, blending more noise rock, mathcore, sludge metal, alt metal of different dosages into the sound to at least take advantage of the upsides of having a disjointed album. And it's like the band pushes the throttle all the way down for each of them, leaving breathing room only for the spoken word skits. This does result in a lot of focus on the faster paces and an album that crams a lot of intensity into 30 minutes.
It's quite obvious why powerviolence acts tend to prefer the shorter runtimes, but the sheer variety here makes We're Still Here extend its lifeforce towards lengths considered EP worthy for doom bands. Finally an album where I can wholeheartedly use the pink text color on the Bandcamp embed.
