Artist: EYEHATEGOD
Support: Church of Misery, Hang The Bastard
Date: Sunday 13th August 2023
Advance Tickets: £23.00
Venue: The Dome, Tufnell Park.
City: London

Back in 2017, all that veteran hardcore/doom-slingers Eyehategod wanted to do was tour, and for about three years that’s all they did. They even back-burnered plans to finish the follow-up to 2014’s incendiary Eyehategod album in order to storm stages across the U.S. and play exotic nations they’d never visited such as Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Israel, Tasmania and more. They played and toured with some of their favorite bands, such as OFF!, Negative Approach, Sheer Terror, Corrosion of Conformity, AntiSeen and the Obsessed.

Like Eyehategod’s best albums, including 1993’s Take as Needed For Pain, 1996’s Dopesick and 2014’s comeback Eyehategod, the band’s first new full-length in seven years, A History of Nomadic Behavior, is a blowtorch-distortion and blues-saturated combination of mostly mid-paced songs pierced with scarring pain and disconsolate fury.

The first release from the album, “High Risk Trigger,” encapsulates the filth and damaged beauty of Eyehategod. The song starts with a chugging groove reminiscent of SST-era Soundgarden before erupting into a doomy minor pentatonic passage that wouldn’t sound out of place on an ‘80s Saint Vitus album. Lyrically, the song -- like most Eyehategod ditties – is cryptic and abstract, but it touches on the all-pervasive fears bred by an invisible germ storm sweeping through the nation and a society sickened by police brutality. (“Infection is the way, disruptive crowd takes aim/ Burn down the rail yard house, destroy the U.S.A.”).