The full Apple Music description of GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR’s new album, NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD, reads “The Montreal collective continues to say so much without saying a word.” This in its own strange way, is projection. The title is a direct reference to the 2023-2024 Gaza genocide. It is a clear statement on what is happening in the world and the circumstances of the album’s creation. So are the six song titles: “SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPORS,” “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD,” “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD,” “BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL,” “PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS,” “GREY RUBBLE, GREEN SHOOTS.”
The band isn’t silent elsewhere either. On the Bandcamp page for NO TITLE, Efrim Menuck and company write:
THE PLAIN TRUTH==
we drifted through it, arguing.
every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.
we sat down together and wrote it in one room,
and then sat down in a different room, recording.
NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?
and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.
the sun setting above beds of ash
while we sat together, arguing.
the old world order barely pretended to care.
this new century will be crueler still.
war is coming.
don’t give up.
pick a side.
hang on.
love.
GY!BE
And yet an editor at Apple Music writes that “The Montreal collective continues to say so much without saying a word.” We understand what the editor isn’t saying – won’t say? can’t say? – because to take a stand with Palestinians, or even just a stand against genocide, even as a mere means of describing what a band is doing when it’s so apparent in their album’s title, might put the editor’s job at risk. It is a strange artifact affixed to the side of what is, in my opinion, a very normal one: an album made in protest of cruelty and genocide and an old world order – all those bastard politicians and corporate CEOs – that does not even pretend to care. It’s hard not to go back to June 1998 and the release of F# A# ∞, to “The Dead Flag Blues,” to the monologue: “We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.” The bleeding has been slow and we are still trapped but nothing that happens to us will compare – ever compare – to being physically trapped by bombs and snipers and giggling little fucking shitheads making viral videos about how they’re demolishing a neighborhood, an apartment block, so that nobody who used to live here can ever come back.
“The Montreal collective continues to say so much without saying a word.”
Every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.
This album is an open space. Maybe you listen to it and it motivates you. Maybe you listen to it and all the inexpressible emotions you’ve been gathering and not letting back out over the past year flow out of you. Maybe it makes you cry. I don’t know. I cried a few times while listening to it, for instance, at the top of the crescendo of BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD. The band stops repeating the same chord progression that has been playing through the rest of the composition, the marching drums kick in, a new riff weaves its way in on guitar and violin, and then – I can’t explain it – shit feels less hopeless for just a second. It feels permissible to cry and to finally get ready for the hard work ahead yet to be done.
RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD, the other long song on side A of this record, does a similar kind of thing with its rising crescendo but remains in a more contemplative space through the entire performance, gaining intensity through the gradual addition of new sound layers before coming to a sudden end. BROKEN SPIRES AT DEAD KAPITAL is a droning introduction to side B, using signal distortion to cast a haunting pall over the sonic landscape. Sophie Trudeau’s violin work comes into stark focus here, tracing a path through a decimated world, leading into Aidan Girt’s ominous slow drumbeat and transitioning into the menacing PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS. Uncertainty and dissonance reign here before finally erupting into searing guitars and percussion. Then suddenly everything changes: we’re now back in sad, mournful, wistful territory. We’re remembering better times, we are keenly aware of our regrets. We want to make things better. And so we’re being propelled forward again. All of the instruments tighten the fuck up and we’re veering down the highway at top speed towards the next protest, the next sit-in, the next weapons manufacturer disruption. We’re carried by the urgency of the moment before being brought back to earth on a single, solitary riff.
The album ends on GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS, a slow waltz through a manmade catastrophe and a meandering path to the exit. The song’s second movement remains in this space, a reminder that the work is not yet done and what this album affords can at best be temporary – we have to return to the world and do what we can to bring the atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon to an end, to make sure that from the river to the sea, all of Palestine will be free.
If the Apple Music description – and criticism – of GY!BE’s NO TITLE is that the band didn’t make all of this clear in a diegetic way, through incredibly specific lyrics or liner notes past what exists, then maybe it would be prudent to end this review with some words.
We all know that the repressive agencies of Israel and the US are training together, and share tips, tools and tactics on how to repress populations and movements of freedom. This should concern anyone involved in local struggles, such as Stop Cop City, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous solidarity, and support for migrants and refugees. We also know that Israel is exporting weapons and repressive technology everywhere. AI tools are being developed and used to automate identifying and killing “suspects.” And we know it goes the other way around—Israel is bombing Gaza (and now also Lebanon) with US weapons and full support. This is an American (and European) war as much as it is Israeli. The imperial core of the Global North is absolutely involved and is a belligerent part of the aggression, and this makes its citizens an active part as well.
It’s not entirely possible to physically join the armed struggle on the ground the way one can in Rojava or Ukraine, but there is no need to. People can come to Palestine to participate in the popular struggle, as brave American and European citizens already have; some of them have become martyrs themselves. This helps, but the resistance is asking for something else: turn your own cities in the imperial core into a battleground. Bring the war home. Open another front. Join the liberation camp, as Al-Araj puts it, and raise hell against the world order that allowed this to happen. They must feel consequences. I believe an uprising is still possible, here in the Interior as well, but it will require us to be brave, like Gazans are.
One last thing I want to ask—as I was writing this piece, the fighting on the fronts in Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere escalated significantly. If a full-blown war erupts elsewhere, the attention of the world will shift and Gaza could be forgotten. People should fight for the lives of Lebanese people as well, but don’t stop talking about Gaza and acting for the sake of people there. The genocide there isn’t over. It might even accelerate once attention shifts away from it.
Raise your voice, raise the flag of revolution.
No voice is louder than the voice of the uprising.