“How do you exist in a world that doesn’t match your moral code, but also doesn’t match your any moral code? asks Lee Buford.

His band, The Body, is less of a musical project and more of a coping mechanism. For a quarter of a century, Buford (electronics/percussion) and Chip King (guitar/vocals) have confronted a world that does not share their values ​​by blocking it – or crushing it – with their music. Their sound crosses punk, doom metal, electro and pure noise, layered endlessly then molded in their image. He exudes frustration and craves empathy.

New album, The cries of thingsis an amalgamation of everything that came before it. The Body’s discography is vast, what it has in common with its collaborators You. Often, Buford and King act as facilitators for the others, alongside longtime producer Seth Manchester; they have also released collaborative records with Uniform, Big Brave and Full Of Hell, among others. This is the second album they released this year, after Orchards of a futile paradisewith Dis Fig (who also appears here, on ‘The Building’). The form the couple takes is The Body, and its function is to foster community.

“I think, on a practical level, it’s good for us, because it connects us to a lot of our friends, in a musical way,” Buford says.

When I speak to Buford via Zoom, he is, confusingly, at King’s home in Portland, Oregon. Recently married, Buford moved from Portland to Connecticut, just a 40-minute drive from The Body’s recording location, Machines With Magnets studio in Providence, Rhode Island. King is touring Europe with Dis Fig. Buford doesn’t steal. He flew once, when he was 14, and that experience was enough for him to never want to do it again.

When carrying out The cries of thingsIt was before his move, Buford undertook several four-day trips from Portland to Providence. The recording process was disjointed, but he thinks that worked in his favor. Originally, The Body had planned to record with a choir as they did on their second album, All the waters of the earth turn into blood. The process for this previous record had been thorough; they used so many overdubs that it took them a year to finish it. For The cries of thingsHowever, they soon found themselves returning to an established approach of starting with samples and building songs from them. They then refined the sounds further, layering them over and over again. “I think it’s more like it’s a bunch of different stuff from all the albums rolled into one,” Buford says. “I think it’s more consistent in that regard, but I also think it makes things quite strange.”

On the “Removal” dub, Buford sampled an MC shouting between songs at a ’90s soundclash and went from there. Dub and reggae are a sonic meeting place where Buford, King and Manchester can all come together. “Seth doesn’t listen to heavy music, and that’s why we get along so well with him, because neither do we,” Buford says. “We don’t really care about getting those kinds of sounds – heavy metal.”

The album’s snippets of lyrics open up something akin to what the lyrics to “A Premonition” describe as “a doorway into darkness.” On ‘The Citadel Unconquered’, a disembodied male voice speaks of his feelings of detachment: “The truth is, I’ve been in a bad way for a long time. Not wanting to do anything (…) I had a wife and children, they meant nothing to me. I have money, it means nothing to me. I have life, it doesn’t mean anything to me.

The essence of the album’s apparent despair is strongly linked to 2014’s. I will die hereproduced by Haxan Cloak. More metallic and downright dark than The cries of thingsit seemed downright suicidal at times. “If I succeed, I die, as I must at some point. If I fail to do so, my choice is essentially to suffer and inflict pain on my family…” says the vocals sampled on “Alone All The Way” from this album. This is reminiscent of what Nathaniel Hawthorne said about his last meeting with Herman Melville, which set the opening of Moby-Dick in the port city of New Bedford, itself now a 40-minute drive from Machines With Magnets: “(he) informed me that he was ‘pretty much set on being wiped out.’

The decade since I will die here saw a change in The Body’s perspective. They went through what Buford calls “a nihilism that was imposed on us” while living in the modern world. In 2010, they told TQ this civilization was “doomed to total failure”. But eschatological boredom is exhausting. And recognizing that life is something we go through together has helped.

“I think it’s always been a thing that we’ve always had, where there’s a lot of frustration (that comes with) living life in a meaningful way and in a good way,” Buford says. “And in doing so, the personal difficulties that you go through and those that the world goes through. It’s hard to be alive and witness how the world works without it affecting you, if you have some empathy for life in general.

One of The Body’s t-shirts depicts a Christian cross with a shroud draped over it and a skull on the ground next to it; Jesus is absent during his own crucifixion. “I’m tired of this world,” reads the t-shirt’s slogan. The use of Christian imagery, here and elsewhere in the group’s output, reflects the hypocrisy of moralizing religious authority figures. “That’s the world they created,” Buford says of the great religions. “But (they) can’t even respect… just the human decency of what (they) created.” And I think that’s where the frustration arises.

As we speak, I notice a small framed photograph of downtown Manhattan at night hanging behind Buford, taken before the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It resembles a miniature portal to a world on the verge of collapse and evokes the continual irruptions challenging its worldview that the West has since resisted. As much as The Body tackles such ideas thematically, they also do so musically. “Careless And Worn” sounds like a song that explodes on its own. After repeated listenings, we wander through the ruins created by its blown rhythm to find the vestiges of a precious melody, even if they are rocking and funerary horns.

Buford grew up in the ’80s, drawn to the dark musicality of The Cure and Depeche Mode. Now, when he listens to pop music, it tends to be “sonically complex,” like the Beach Boys. Even though it’s very listenable, there’s a lot going on. For him, The Body is a “simplified” version.

King spent the early 2000s playing alongside Sleep rip-offs in the stoner rock scene and completely burned out on guitar riffs. Buford believes this explains King’s tendency to “bury the melody as much as he can.”

“I mean, not just in the doom/stoner scene,” King adds via email while on tour with Dis Fig. “The repetitive riff-to-riff format has gotten pretty old in a lot of guitar-centric music. But many bands seemed to just look back and base their entire sound on one of four or five records from the ’70s and 80.”

The Body believes that the world is not an easy place, and music shouldn’t be either. The Corps keeps count. When a bare, ringing guitar resonates on album closer “All Worries,” it feels like a reward for making it this far. Stripped of the sonic ferocity of elsewhere, it allows other insidious horrors to infiltrate, with its sampled chants and King’s electro-vocal howl: “the weariness of horror/the awareness of complicity”.

The genocide in Gaza hovers The cries of things like an immense shadow, where “the flames are reflected on the low cloud” (“A Premonition”). As “Removal” says: “where will you go/when your house is razed”. While the apocalypse is still delayed in the West (appearing in flashes), it is underway in the Middle East.

Buford says Israeli treatment of Palestinians has been “a big sticking point” for The Body for years, turning down concerts in Israel as early as 15 years ago. For him, the fate of the Palestinian people is “a perfect example of how the world can choose what matters for lives”.

“I remember right after October 7, I felt like I was going crazy,” Buford said. “It’s like Palestine didn’t exist before October 7, and not to put it in any context, honestly, I felt like I was going crazy. Because people that I love, even respect, are behaving like this is a crazy thing, and they are so surprised that this is happening. And it’s kind of crazy to not think that would be the end result of living there.

King tells me the lyrics were written before the current conflict erupted. “But these are the conditions that have led to this ongoing nightmare that the Israeli regime and the United States are perpetuating, not only in Gaza and the rest of Palestine, but throughout the region,” he wrote. “They talk about Sudan, Congo, Cuba. Just about everywhere. The rich and powerful create as much instability as possible in order to take advantage of conditions to keep raw materials as cheap as possible. All this to the detriment of the majority of the world. I feel like I have a lot more in common with a cobalt miner from Central Africa than I do with a fucking billionaire, even though our situations are very different.

Maybe this album could have been called The pursuit of things. The most uncomfortable emotional truth in The Body’s music seems to revolve around a verse from “The Building”: “wringing your hands in worry/is nothing.” This “nothing” could mean that complaining is insufficient in the face of humanity’s suffering. Or that it’s the least of it. Or that it doesn’t make sense.

“I don’t think there is a moral code that applies to the world in general,” King says. “The disparity of conditions between us all testifies to this (…) All the wealth and power consolidated in the world bleeds dry the workers, the poor and those excluded from our rights. The disappearance of a highly consuming middle class destroys the illusion that success, whatever it may be, is possible. Sure, it’s mostly the US I know, but since we export the worst aspects of our culture all over the world, I wouldn’t expect things to really improve. We believe in things like fairness, justice, and equality, but most of the evidence I see indicates (by the way) that these things don’t really exist unless you can afford them, which unfortunately , most of us can’t do it.

The body seeks catharsis through connection. Buford points out that the only tour they did without one or more of their important friend networks was with the post-black metal band Alcest. This network is a who’s who of innovators in the audio extremity space, from Uniform to Full of Hell to Big Brave to Kristin Hayter. It’s simple: working with their friends helps them feel better.

But how would they like We what do you feel after listening to this new album?

“Ideally, I would like everyone who listens to give me a little kiss on the forehead,” says King, “arm ourselves and, hand in hand, we destroy all the boundaries, foundations and artifices of a culture human centered on wealth.

The Body’s new album, The Crying Out Of Things, is out now via Thrill Jockey