Scope Neglect

Ben Frost presents his first studio album in six years, Scope Neglect, via Mute. Available on black vinyl and CD on March 1st.

In the sonic crucible of Ben Frost's Scope Neglect, music undergoes a metamorphic alchemy. From the album’s opening seconds, the familiar aural chemistry of metal is immediately untethered, isolated in the vacuum, stripped of its cultural trappings and heavy armory, and loaded into a particle accelerator.

Where Scope Neglect leans sonically into metal - fuelled by progressive metal outfit Car Bomb’s guitarist Greg Kubacki and bassist Liam Andrews of fellow Australians My Disco - its true form seems to draw more upon the transcendental reveries of the West Coast minimalists. What at first appears confrontational, and ephemeral, is meditatively and methodically unfolded through time, revealing crystalline vulnerabilities.

Frost’s titles weave narratives of cycling, perpetual attempts at ignition, math, and mythology; ‘Tritium Bath’, ‘Lamb Shift’, ‘Chimera’... The slow burn of ‘Unreal in the Eyes of the Dead’ channels the disorienting writings of author W.G Sebald, whose own work often gives the impression of being only the faint, flickering shadow of its actual referent.

Similarly, this genre-defying music seems to feed on an unseen dark matter. Detached from their native surroundings, guitar shapes roar through negative spaces whose dimension is only revealed through the shadows cast upon them. What remains is the outer scaffolding of structures long since dismantled, and which we can no longer see. What Frost wants us to hear, in other words, is frequently not what he wants us to feel.

Scope Neglect is a deliberate opposition in terms; a dualistic game of obfuscation and obliteration, mechanics reconfigured and reengineered, old energies diverted and redirected, scope expanded, contracted and dissolved.

Released: March 2024
Cat: STUMM503
Label: Mute