Melbourne progressive-death outfit Growth have just dropped Under The Under via Wild Thing Records, the long-awaited second chapter of their planned trilogy, and if you thought heavy music couldn’t make you sit with your own unresolved trauma on a Friday afternoon, well. Here we are.
Listen to Under The Under | Watch the title track video
Previously on… Growth
The band — brothers Tristan Barnes (guitar/bass/artwork) and Nelson Barnes (drums), vocalist LF, Nick Rackham (bass) and Ben Boyle (guitar) — started in 2017 as a deliberate, unflinching space to explore trauma, mental illness and grief without romanticising any of it. Their debut, The Smothering Arms of Mercy, was written from within collapse. Under The Under exists in the far more uncomfortable territory that follows: what happens after you survive, when you’re forced to figure out who you actually are once the wreckage settles.
The gap between albums has been half a decade. It was deliberate, and apparently necessary.
The Album
Under The Under documents six stages of recovery — not as milestones to celebrate, but as thresholds to be endured. If that sounds heavy, it is. The band themselves describe healing as “not gentle.” Chaotic. Disorienting. Often more confronting than the pain that came before it.
The album opens with “Remember Me as Fire” — picking up exactly where the last record left off, in that paralysed below-rock-bottom place where your whole identity has collapsed into the worst version of yourself. Step one is just becoming aware of that. It burns, apparently. Then you keep going.
“Under the Under” is where it gets genuinely interesting: it’s about the strange comfort of being haunted. Surrounding yourself with grief and loss because at least they’re something, something with form and weight. The terrifying question underneath all of that is whether the dignity you’ve built around your suffering is even real — and whether you’d be okay without it. Heavy concept. Enormous riff, presumably.
“Slings That Shatter” goes back to the beginning — to before you were old enough to understand what was happening to you, and how you eventually became your own explanation for the pain. The values you hold for others developing a sharp, inward-facing edge. Digging into shame as the third step.
“Pain is Never Far Away” is about the part nobody tells you: recovery isn’t the absence of pain. It’s learning to feel all of it — every memory, every sideways moment — without it destroying you. Which is a significantly bigger ask.
“Forward, Further, Spirit Killer” wants you to kill the idea that you are made entirely of your stories. Your past shaped you, sure, but it doesn’t own the whole of you. There are things you want to see in the world, things you recognise as strength, that exist entirely outside of what happened to you. Understanding that is step five.
And then “Death Cannot Hold Me” closes the record with something that isn’t quite resolution — it’s more honest than that. You went down in a spiral. You come back up in one too. Every pass, you see echoes of what dragged you down. But you’re seeing them from a different angle now. The sixth step is nurturing that shift. Respecting the white-knuckled grit that carried you this far, even if you don’t love yourself yet.
The band note that step seven — balance — is what’s coming next. On the third album. Which, given this one, is going to be something else entirely.
The Title Track Video
The music video for Under The Under is a nine-minute short film with a David Lynch energy that you genuinely do not expect to find attached to a progressive death metal record. Written and directed by Nick Rackham (yes, the bassist), and produced, filmed, and edited by Karl Steller (The Omnific, Gravemind, The Beautiful Monument), it’s the kind of visual accompaniment that makes an already massive song feel genuinely cinematic.
Watch it here. It’s worth nine minutes of your afternoon.
Tour Dates
Growth are heading out nationally in August, supporting Psycroptic and Rivers of Nihil. Tickets are on sale now via daltours.cc/psycroptic-rivers.
Thursday August 13 — Magnet House, Perth
Friday August 14 — Lion Arts, Adelaide
Saturday August 15 — Max Watts, Melbourne
Friday August 21 — Manning Bar, Sydney
Saturday August 22 — Necrosonic Festival, Brisbane
Under The Under is out now via Wild Thing Records. Follow Growth at linktr.ee/growthnoise.
