It’s not loud, not at first. Life is Violence, the debut from Idle Heirs, creeps in under the skin—quiet, heavy, and deeply felt. Sean Ingram, best known for fronting the feral hardcore band Coalesce, sounds worn in a way that feels real—not dramatic, just lived-in. And alongside producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Barber, he’s built something that feels less like a comeback and more like an exhale after holding your breath for years.
Barber had taken himself to the edge of the Pacific Northwest—literally—to map out the foundation for these songs. You can hear that isolation in the music. Guitars stretch out like fog, drums land with the weight of stones dropped into water. There’s a stillness to these tracks, but it’s never stagnant. It’s the kind of stillness you get when everything else has finally gone quiet enough for your thoughts to surface.
There are eight songs, but it feels like one long, uneasy conversation. Ingram’s lyrics move around themes of legacy, fatherhood, and mortality, circling them without ever quite resolving. He’s not trying to be poetic. These aren’t statements; they’re admissions. Half-thoughts. Regrets. Hopes that never fully form.
Musically, Life is Violence sits somewhere between post-metal and ambient sludge, but it doesn’t feel tethered to genre. There’s a lot of space here. The production is unvarnished, like they didn’t bother sanding the edges off. It sounds like people making music because they needed to, not because they had a record to deliver.
There’s no sense of spectacle. No grand narrative arc. Just the messy process of trying to carry grief and keep going. That gives the record a kind of weight that’s hard to fake.
Life is Violence is out now on Relapse Records.
Photo by: Chadwick Christopher.
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