Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power has announced the third album for his side project Blanck Mass. It’s called World Eater, and it’s a reaction to the crazy year 2016 was. Power says, “The title is a reference to both the inner beast inside human beings that when grouped en-masse stops us from moving forward towards good.” It has the same ambient fluidity of Fuck Buttons and the excellent 2015 Blanck Mass effort Dumb Flesh, but it’s tinged with the anger, violence, confusion, and frustration of a year that was hard to make sense of.

An epitomic foray into Power’s latest full-length offering is the fractured, warped seven-and-a-half-minute excursion “Please.” It gradually builds into a slow-churning mix of atmospheric sweeps, glitching vocal samples, dense synth layers, and off-time-on-purpose percussion that makes for a woozy, mesmerizing listen. The soundscape is wonderfully disorienting, adding and subtracting layers deftly for stratospheric highs and transfixing lows. And it mirrors Power’s vision for the album and its setting, and how he thinks it has affected the project’s growth:

Being surrounded by so much hate in the world right now throws a whole new light on the importance of love. I have never set out to make a protest record. I’ve never set out to make any kind of record really, but during the creative process for this and any of my past releases I start to form a bond with the project as we grow together.

Listen.

Tracklist:

01 “John Doe’s Carnival of Error”
02 “Rhesus Negative”
03 “Please”
04 “The Rat”
05 “Silent Treatment”
06 “Minnesota / Eas Fors / Naked”
07 “Hive Mind”

World Eater is out 3/10 via Sacred Bones. Pre-order it here.