Black Fucking Cancer. With a name like that, what more can be said? Well, the Bay Area black metal band has a new album—Procreate Inverse—out today on Sentient Ruin Laboratories, and it’s a fitting time for it. After all, the COVID anniversary mentioned earlier (see opening note) is not a cheerful one: At least six million people have died as a result of the pandemic and many more millions have had their lives upended either through ongoing symptoms of long COVID, the crushing economic effects of widening wealth disparity, or just good old fashioned political stupidity, neglect, and maliciousness.
Early in the pandemic, starry-eyed idealists like myself may have hoped and wished the pandemic would serve as something like an alien invasion, uniting all people across the planet to set aside insignificant differences to fight together against this common scourge. Instead, two years into this thing, we have Russia launching a full-scale invasion in Ukraine, threatening a nuclear world war between superpowers while dozens of other violent struggles, apartheid states, and injustices with less or no press coverage silently go on. And so, what better soundtrack for this dark place and time, than a cynical sting of an album from a band called Black Fucking Cancer?
