With Before There Was, The Chariot keeps digging the trench it carved for itself from the start: a hardcore that refuses straight lines and comfortable resolutions. The Georgia band, led by Josh Scogin, never tries to seduce through melody or structure, but through constant tension, rhythmic instability and a deliberately dirty production that lets the distortions, the micro-accidents and the cut-off breaths bleed through. This is a record that always sounds on the verge of collapsing, and that is exactly where its power lies.
Chaos as a language
What strikes immediately is the absence of familiar markers: riffs never repeat identically, tempos crumble and restart without warning, and the vocals, screamed to the point of rupture, sometimes seem to fight against the instrumentation rather than follow it. This isn’t cold, metronomic technical mathcore: it’s a more organic, more instinctive form of dissonance, where the assumed mistake becomes an expressive tool in itself. The guitars grind and deliberately detune, the rhythm section hits off-kilter, as if sabotaging any attempt at comfortable listening.
A production that bites
The sound of Before There Was rejects polished studio comfort. You can feel the band captured in its spontaneity, with takes that favor raw energy over sonic cleanliness. This approach, which could be seen as a flaw elsewhere, becomes a signature here: it brings the listening experience closer to the band’s live shows, that reputation for near uncontrollable intensity the group has carried since its beginnings. The shorter passages hit like shards, the longer ones build an almost unbearable tension before crashing suddenly into silence or feedback.
A listen that exhausts as much as it fascinates
The downside of this radicalism is that the album makes no concession to accessibility. There’s no track designed to hook, no chorus that holds back, no melodic breathing space to grab onto. The unprepared listener risks feeling lost, even assaulted by this accumulation of dissonance and rupture. But for those willing to be carried by this organized chaos, the experience becomes almost hypnotic: one eventually perceives an internal logic, a coherence within the apparent incoherence, which sets The Chariot apart from bands that settle for gratuitous brutality.
Before There Was is neither a transitional record nor a compromise: it’s another demonstration of what the band does best, pushing hardcore toward its most unstable edges without ever losing intensity. It’s not the most accessible record in their catalog, nor the most immediately memorable, but it confirms that The Chariot remains one of the most unpredictable bands of its scene, faithful to a radical vision that never seeks to please, only to fully exist within the chaos it generates.
