In the decade that Blind Girls have spent making blistering and technical screamo, their efforts have resulted in 2 albums, 3 EP’s, a split, and a single. The 2022 album from the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia quintet, The Weight of Everything, is a crushing exploration of seamless discord. Blind Girls’ tempestuous performances have earned them a dedicated following in their home country, further expanded by tours in Japan, Canada and the United States. While performing the unrelenting material of The Weight of Everything over two years around the world, Blind Girls quietly administered higher doses of melody in new work, giving more time and care to doleful passages of solitary guitar strumming that appeared in past songs. These songs, to be released through Persistent Vision, make up Blind Girls’ new album, An Exit Exists.

Blind Girls have a distinct way of making entire works sound like a single composition, both live and on record, championing the punk tradition of playing with as few breaks as possible, if any. Ben Smith’s extraordinarily intense drumming is akin to bands like Ampere and Converge, the frantic riage of guitarists Julian Currie, Luke Sweeney, and bassist Mark Grant is simultaneously representative of current hardcore and reminiscent of metalcore of days past, and the throat-lacerating screams of vocalist Sharni Brouwer are in a class shared perhaps only with Jerome’s Dream. This is no small feat. Still yet, the tracks on An Exit Exists are more powerful than ever before, as Blind Girls employ the same engineering team of Brock Weston for recording and Rollie Ulug for mixing and mastering as they did for The Weight of Everything. The band was intent on harnessing the familiarity built with the two for An Exit Exists, and as listeners are pulled through the record, it’s clear that they have once again overseen Blind Girls achieving new heights of sonic extremity, now stitched together by passages of deeply emotional musicality.

The emotion in the heavily incorporated melodies, not to mention the face-ripping breakdowns and thrashing blast beats, of An Exit Exists are the complement to its conceptual theme addressing abuse. Brouwer explains, “An Exit Exists was written during and retrospectively on two separate instances dealing with abuse from those I loved. Each song is a reflection on the emotions and process I went through from realization, feeling trapped, guilt, defeat, acceptance and eventually finding a safe way out.

Ian Noe

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