Can’t get enough of them. Specially Haus Arafna.

When Eric Zwierzynski utters “there is work to be done” at the beginning of American Despair, one is immediately plunged into sonic and cognitive chaos. As he critiques the current landscape of suffering and slaughter that we are visiting upon our own people in here the U.S. and the Palestinians in Gaza, you are invited to grapple with the following conundrum:

“Is he talking about the work of undoing these global evils? Or the more mundane task of simply working to make a living in the midst of such agony and pain?”

At the risk of untangling the feedback-laden web that Ministry of Apathy has woven, there are no easy answers to be found here. This is experimental noise that’s as confrontational and timely as the events it’s tackling. The attentive listener will find themselves getting lost in the layers of almost primal rhythms, the battering waves of glitched-out vocals, and the relentless pulsing of sound design and industrial effects. It is a journey into a certain sort of madness that can only be experienced, not fully explained.

The one time we’re allowed up for air comes midway through the album, as Zwierzynski drops the wall of noise and grants us a reprieve…but only to open up to even more emotional depths through clean vocals that wrestle further with the futility and sense of powerlessness against the wrongs that our country are constantly inflicting. And soon thereafter, we are overtaken once more by the noise: shrieks, piercing tones, a barrage of sound. Reminiscent of Greymachine’s Disconnect, we can either resist the storm of tones and effects enveloping us or simply give in and allow ourselves to be carried along by the electric current.

It is an experience both punishing and cleansing. Come bathe in the waves of feedback and mourning. 

from "The Creative Nothing" out on November 6th, 2026 on hybrid SACD. www.blackringrituals.com

The first noise release on hybrid SACD. Mastered for SACD by Mark Donahue of Soundmirror, a multi-Grammy-winning engineer better known for orchestral recordings. The disc is a hybrid dual layer, so the CD layer plays in any standard player.