“Gotta make connections with real people.” — Andrew Lee
Remember when Bandcamp was independent? And remember when they regularly hosted intimate shows at their office and record store in downtown Oakland? That was sick.
Two years after their live performance there, Ripped to Shreds released the recordings on No Glory Here to Be Found, capturing a blistering half hour of their grinding death metal. Though they have since released a new album entitled Sanshi (2024)—exploring the themes of death and the afterlife in the context of traditional Chinese folklore—in their Bandcamp performance the group plays songs from Luan (2020) and Jubian (2022).
With Jubian, the first Ripped to Shreds album on Relapse, Lee said that a key driving force of the band was increasing the “visibility of ABCs [American-born Chinese] in extreme metal by being very blatantly Chinese.” Whether you’re familiar with the cultural context or not, the music is a rapid, megalithic, relentless pummeling of demonic noise from its “Opening Salvo” to it final “Peregrination.”
Ripped to Shreds tours Taiwan and Japan in November, but you can see them in Berkeley alongside Master, Laceration, and Molten at 924 Gilman on Friday, October 10.
