Seattle’s God Tongue comes writhing back into view with the official video for Grip, landing like somebody slipped a tab of acid into the circuitry of an old warehouse PA. This is a nasty little delight, the kind of track that feels like it was born under a strobe light in a room with bad wiring, suspicious stains, and one person in the corner who may or may not be a prophet. The band’s self-described “Acid Body Rave” tag sounds at first like the sort of phrase a group might invent after too much coffee and one treasured VHS copy of Liquid Sky, but here it actually fits. You hear it and think: yes, that is exactly the sickness we ordered.
God Tongue have built their whole deal around an ugly-beautiful collision of EBM muscle, acid corrosion, minimal-wave chill, and the sort of B-movie sleaze that used to drift through midnight cable. Grip tightens that recipe into a mean machine. The bassline stomps in with a cold-blooded purpose, the drum programming snaps like a trap being tested for your ankle, and the synths smear themselves across the track in warped streaks. The song’s general menace comes with a side helping of a wicked sense of play, the feeling that the band knows exactly how deliciously absurd this zone can get when you lean into it with enough conviction and enough damaged equipment.
The video, shot by Vancouver filmmaker Daniel Brand, understands the assignment and then scribbles in the margins. It is lo-fi, grainy, weird, and gloriously glitched, like somebody found a floppy disk in the gutter marked DO NOT OPEN and naturally opened it in the middle of a dark club. There are flashes of mysterious data, a masked fiend serving…milkshakes? And a general mood of A Clockwork Orange-meets-cyberpunk depravity that brings to mind Hackers after a nervous breakdown and Strange Days after one too many energy drinks. The imagery has that degraded, diseased glamour that makes you want to laugh and recoil at the same time, which is usually a good sign.
Watch Grip below:
Grip lurches, lunges, and locks in. God Tongue are not aiming for polish; they want impact, pressure, and a little psychic damage on the side. Bless them for that. In a world overflowing with tidy little tracks that behave themselves, Grip shows up with its shirt half-buttoned, its pupils blown wide, and a grin that suggests very poor intentions.
Listen to Grip below and order the album LIMINAL here.
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