Below rock bottom under the weight of truth.
Yet in facing truth there is a spark that reveals there’s more to you than your darkest place…
Over half a decade on from the release of their debut album, The Smothering Arms of Mercy, Melbourne progressive-death outfit Growth have re-emerged with Remember Me As Fire, the first new music from the long-awaited second chapter of their planned trilogy aimed at going beyond expressing emotion, illustrating pathways of recovery while acknowledging the most dread-filled aspects of it.
That second chapter, titled Under The Under is planned for release on March 27 via Wild Thing Records.
The gap between releases has been deliberate….and necessary. Where The Smothering Arms of Mercy was written from within collapse, sickness and isolation, Under the Under exists in the far more uncomfortable space that follows: what happens when survival is no longer the question and you’re forced to confront who you are once the wreckage settles. In the bands own words, healing, is not gentle. It is an ugly process. Chaotic, disorienting and often more confronting than the pain that preceded it..
Growth began in 2017 as a reflective space for brothers Tristan Barnes (guitar/bass/artwork) and Nelson Barnes(drums), and vocalist LF, later joined by Nick Rackham (bass) and Ben Boyle (guitar), to explore trauma, mental illness and grief without romanticising them. The project was never intended as catharsis for its own sake, but as a way to illustrate recovery in all its brutality. not as linear progress, but as something fractured, cyclical and deeply human.
Remember Me As Fire begins precisely where Mercy ended. Written from the perspective of existing below rock bottom, the track explores the moment where self erasure feels easier than self awareness, and the violence required to step beyond that.
The line “I thought I had already fallen as far as I could go” is delivered with almost vile contempt, before giving way to a subtle shift in tone, a fragile, uneasy suggestion of possibility “a shadow with a dream to grasp the warmth of sunlight.”
“Remember Me As Fire” isn’t a demand for legacy, but a refusal to disappear quietly into the abyss. Fire in this context doesn’t equal triumph, but awareness. Painful, consuming and necessary.
Listen to Remember Me As Fire
https://orcd.co/
Watch the video here
https://youtu.be/BFx0u27Buro
The single acts as the first step into Under the Under, an album that documents six stages of recovery not as levels to be celebrated, but as thresholds to be endured. Across the record, Growth interrogates the dignity we attach to suffering, the comfort of identifying solely with trauma and the terrifying possibility that we might be more than the stories that have kept us alive.
If The Smothering Arms of Mercy was a document of total spiritual collapse, Under the Under is about the ugliness of its reconstruction. Shame, fear, memory and the quiet violence of choosing to move forward regrdless.
Growth does not offer solutions but instead offer honesty and an invitation to sit with the questions most of us spend our lives avoiding.
Under the Under is set for release on March 27 via Wild Thing Records
Pre Orders available now
https://orcd.co/undertheunder
