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After four years of radio silence, Chris Grigg and his black metal project Woe are finally releasing their album Hope Attrition. In that span of time, Grigg actually wrote nearly another album's worth of material which was then discarded at the insistence of bassist Grzesiek Czapla, who co-produced the record and took on another important function bands often ignore: editor, at least in a collaborative sense. All that music we'll never hear is integral to the success of Hope Attrition.

Rules make for good creative expression. Author and radio host Ira Glass, one of the great popular storytellers alive today, is a good source of rules to live and write by. Readers may be familiar with viral soundbite-turned-video 'The Gap', which encourages artists near the beginning of their careers to make a great volume of work until they produce good work consistently.

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It's safe to say most music submissions we receive at Invisible Oranges fall into the category of work made in that gap between good taste and good product. Most metal bands have great influences which they emulate, but produce only so-so- results. They need editors.

That video left out an important second piece to Glass's rule about creating large volumes of work. You can find that second piece here, but if you don't feel like sifting through the link, it goes like this:

Killing a mediocre story is victory. Killing a mediocre story is making room for an excellent story.

The single biggest mistake musicians make is not abandoning their bad ideas soon enough. The first step to learning from a mistake is acknowledging that the mistake was made. Grigg discarded a whole lot of mistakes while writing Hope Attrition, and his ability to do that is every bit as central to the creative integrity of Woe as his riff writing skills.

Here's Grigg on the song itself:

“'The Din of the Mourning' is the dramatic tale of a system’s inevitable collapse, those who push against progress, and those who exploit fear. It was written over the course of many months, seeing revision after revision, and did not feel finished until we received the guest vocals from Brooks Wilson (Crypt Sermon). I had a rule against performing my own clean vocals on this album but this song demanded a feeling of drama that only Brooks could provide."

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Hope Attrition will be released on March 17 via Vendetta Records. Pre-order it on Bandcamp. Follow Woe on Facebook.

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