Content Warning: This article mentions violence and eating disorders.
In 2024, the industrial metal band Uniform released my favorite album of the year. “American Standard is one of the most punishing, brutal and sad records I have ever listened to, but it is also one of the most beautiful. I cannot stop wrestling with it.
Uniform has been making intense “industrial” and “noise rock” albums for over a decade. Their lineup consists of vocalist Michael Berdan, guitarist Ben Greenberg, Mike Sharp and Michael Blume on drums, and Brad Truax on Bass. “American Standard” finds them musically and lyrically at their most visceral and grandiose.
The album centers around alienation caused by long-term illness. Frontman Michael Berdan has been open about his struggles with alcoholism and bulimia, writing about it in a 2024 article for The Quietus.
“American Standard” opens with a daunting 21-minute title track, which begins with a yelling call-and-response about the narrator’s self-hatred: “A part of me, but it can’t be me.” This idea is then distilled down to the bodily horrors the narrator feels as he screams, “This meat on my waist/ It hangs off my waist.”
He describes how his body sweats, cries, reeks and bleeds, but is convinced that “It’s something else; it can’t be me.”With this declaration, driving bass and drums chugging below the track kick in.
Above the track enters the guitar, shrill and clear as a bell. Together, the instruments form a drone that feels like a military march, certain and rigid.
The longer this goes, the more uncomfortable the rigidity of the track becomes. Listeners feel the same discomfort in their bodies that the narrator desperately conveys as Berdan shrieks over the top of the track as if the music is drowning his voice out.
On the next track, “This is Not a Prayer,” the self-loathing is projected outwards. The narrator begs an unnamed person to “get up the nerve to tell me that I look sick.” The instrumentation mutates from the opening track’s droning march to a frenzied cacophony of pulsing drum beats and howling guitars. Only the bass grounds the chaos.
In the final two tracks, “Clemency” and “Permanent Embrace,” the narrator’s struggles do not find a comforting resolution.
In “Clemency,” Berdan growls, “You can’t change who you are,” and “Permanent Embrace” ends the record agreeing with this notion. It closes the album with an image of “Ashes on the pyre/ In permanent embrace/ And you found my love appalling.”
The album is a lament with no solution. There are resolutions and changes, but no turn towards hope, which I find comforting.
Often, we pretend our pain and suffering are easily resolved. This record shirks every pretense of ease and refuses to put on a smile. Instead, it chooses immediacy and raw honesty that can feel both hideous and necessary.
Psalm 88 is a biblical passage with eerie similarities to the illness and agony experienced in “American Standard.” This is one of the few psalms without “a happy ending.” Its narrator is considered ill, disgusted by their appearance, and wallowing in self-loathing.
In verse 8, the narrator proclaims, “You have caused my companions to shun me; you have made me a thing of horror to them. I am shut in so that I cannot escape”. Later, they conclude their prayer with “I suffer your terrors; I am desperate” and “My companions are in darkness.”
Psalm 88 evokes the same feeling as Uniform’s music and lyrics. I can feel the writers’ woes oozing from the pages and speakers. Both artists look unflinchingly at their pains and openly bare their wounds. It is horrifying and revelatory in the same breath.
Both the Psalmist and Uniform grasp a truth we can miss when we focus too heavily on our pains as a thing of the past. Some pains are too big to understand or explain away.
Suffering gnaws at our insides for years. Our bodies deteriorate and turn against us. Our minds play tricks on us.
For those times, we need songs that sit with us in the pain and horror of our suffering. We need these songs to remind us to empathize and love those who need our help.
This is especially important as we approach Lent, a period of grief and reflection. Too often we are so content as we look toward Easter that we can forget to nurse our pains or to see the pains of others.
We are living in an especially brutal time for the outsiders and outcasts in America. Our elected officials are often cruel and indifferent to our individual and communal sufferings.
In this time of reflection, we have an opportunity to reflect on these sufferings even if we don’t see hope. Instead of ignoring or being defeated by our pains, let us be inspired by something beautiful that opens our hearts to ourselves and others.
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Samuel Shepley is currently a junior at the University of Belmont. He is double majoring in English and Faith and Social Justice.
