Album Of The Week: Tragedy Darker Days Ahead

Those of us who make our livings writing blog posts about music have an easy time forgetting this, but underground music is still very much a real thing, and bands like Tragedy are the reason why. To an extremely small portion of the population, the Portland-via-Memphis crust-punk band is an absolutely legendary institution, and the rest of the world has pretty much no idea that they exist. The new Darker Days Ahead is the band's first album in six years, and its release should be some kind of event. But they self-release their records, barely tour, don't employ managers or publicists, and have no website, so you have to check in the right places to figure out that the album exists, or why it matters. Here's why it matters: Tragedy have become folk heroes by pushing their genre to its expressive extremes, putting every trick they have into the service of gigantic slabs of forbidding, apocalyptic darkness. They use acoustic guitars and ambient radio-chatter and blazing power-metal guitar-leads whenever they want, and they put all these things into the service of roaring deep-concentration anger-bombs that, when you're listening to them, make the world feel like a different place. Darker Days Ahead is their furthest-out album yet -- an absolutely crushing slab that's closer to metal than to just about all ideas of punk rock. It's awesome.