Hidden Mothers new opus, Erosion/Avulsion, is a hell of a ride through the darkest recesses of the mind and to those hidden corners of your soul where you don’t let either light or other people enter. It is harrowing, it is angry, it is the reflection of self doubt that each and every one of us sees at least once a day when we look in the mirror, and it is each scar that life has marked you with as the years have rolled by.

Erosion/Avulsion isn’t easy listening. It isn’t going to take you by the hand and walk you down a brightly lit road where flowers sing, the sun always shines, and everybody is lobotomised happy. What Hidden Mothers are going to do with this release is force you to go to places you don’t want to, and make you face the fucking demons that live there heqd-on, with or without your permission

Defanged starts this harrowing journey off and it does so by getting right up in your face and screaming like insanity given form. But, if you expect the rest of Erosion/Avulsion to follow suit then you will be sadly mistaken. Yes, there is more than enough musical violence on offer here to satisfy even the most ardent of metal head, with influences ranging from the likes of Tool and the seriously underrated Glassjaw all thrown into the mix, but the real genius of Hidden Mothers – at least to my ears – lays in the as many moments of pure gentleness that Erosion/Avulsion has to offer.

No where is this more obvious than on the track Grandfather, a melancholy song that will tug at your heart as much as it will your mind. And yet, it’s when these two differing approaches to songwriting collide – as they do to perfection on my favorite track Haze – that Hidden Mothers come into their own.

Haze also brings Erosion/Avulsion to its complete circle. If Defanged is the savage that grabs you by your hair and drags you off to face your own personal horrors, and the rest of the tracks a journey through your own nightmare psyche, then Haze is you crawling out of the wreckage that you once were, changed for the better.

Hidden Mothers Erosion/Avulsion isn’t just a record. It’s therapy in eight tracks, whether you want it or not, and at less than £8 on their Bandcamp page, it’s a fuck load cheaper than going to some quack shrink who wants to know how you feel about your (hidden) mother.