It was the first GREAT AMERICAN GHOST show in 18 months, and there was no guarantee there’d even be an audience. The Ghost Inside, Every Time I Die, The Acacia Strain, and Currents filled out a bill booked for the outdoor parking lot stage at the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts. GREAT AMERICAN GHOST, hailing from nearby Boston, went on earliest, with lots of daylight left on the clock.
“I was nervous,” frontman Ethan Harrison confesses. “I figured nobody was going to come early to watch us. I’ll always find a way to be anxious in those situations. It was the most people we’ve ever played in front of before and the most people I’ve ever stood in front of personally.”
The triumphant post-pandemic return in front of 10,000 enthusiastic people was a testament to just how successfully GREAT AMERICAN GHOST connected through a steady stream of furious music. The group Metal Injection calls “always hateful, always pissed” steadily built a devoted following with the bleak and punishing Everyone Leaves (2015), Hatred Stems from The Seed (2017), the Don’t Come Back EP (2016), and Power Through Terror (2019).
Even as the worldwide shutdown and personal adversities big and small threatened to derail the band, perseverance ultimately prevailed, resulting in a brand new 4-song EP called Torture World poised to take the band’s vicious bile in new directions.
“We were excited about Power Through Terror and ready to hit the road as much as humanly possible,” Harrison recalls. “We had a bunch of touring ready to roll when the record came out in February. Then we were locked down in March. It was a really long 18 months for us, like most people. There were a lot of points where really bad things happened, and we thought, ‘Well, maybe we just don’t want to do the band anymore.’ My mental health was going downward. We had a really horrible year, honestly.”
But as the light began to creep in toward the end of the tunnel, with plans for shows and even touring on the horizon, Harrison and his bandmates – guitarist Niko Gasparrini and drummer Davier Perez – began to feel some glimmers of hope. “The conversations started to feel more real. It gave me a feeling that I hadn’t had in a long time. I missed the band even more than I realized.”
The band returned to producer Will Putney (A Day To Remember, Knocked Loose, The Amity Affliction) to put together Torture World. The group described by Kerrang! as “an exercise in old-school extremity” and one of the 50 Greatest American Hardcore Bands Right Now took things up a notch, somehow managing to rival and even top prior Great American Ghost anthems like “Prison of Hate,” “Ann Arbor (Be Safe),” and “No Savior.” Harrison and Gasparrini spoke about their shared love of Nine Inch Nails and industrial, resulting in the very metal but angular, sharply percussive Torture World opener “Kingmaker.”
“We didn’t have any pressure or expectations in terms of how this new EP should sound,” Harrison says. “We did what we wanted, and this is what came from it. There’s a larger scope of sound happening than on our earlier releases. Bells, percussion, a lot of extra instrumentation.” And the riffs are still there.
“I’d set all of these limitations on us,” the singer confesses, looking back on the group’s 2012 inception. “We were a straight-up hardcore band. But as we’ve progressed, it’s become clearer that, well, I don’t really give a fuck what anybody wants us to do or not. We’ve become a totally different entity.”
As ever, GREAT AMERICAN GHOST directs old-school hardcore wrath at hypocrisy, apathy, and self-loathing, delivered in a dark cloud of relentlessly bludgeoning riffs. The Boston hardcore tradition includes seminal pioneers like Gang Green, SSD, and DYS. The back of Harrison’s head is tattooed with the symbol for The Hope Conspiracy. But make no mistake, each successive release is a devastating, mature metal-fueled odyssey. As Harrison once put it, “No matter how much my dudes listen to Meshuggah and Gojira, I’m always going to sound like I love American Nightmare because I do.”
And it’s that potent concoction of the push and pull between hardcore spite and metal ferocity that makes GREAT AMERICAN GHOST so undeniably exciting. The Metal Alliance, Warped Tour, and Never Say Die! tour veterans won support from MetalSucks, New Noise, and Metal Injection almost from the start.
Early releases tackled feelings of hopelessness, thoughts of suicide, and bitterness about broken relationships with naked aggression. On Power Through Terror, Harrison turned his poison pin outward as well, going after government complicity in sex trafficking and abuse; a friend’s debilitating struggle with alcoholism; the fear of failure that keeps so many bound up in apathy. In “Prison of Hate,” he even indulged his fascination with quantum physics. “It’s about how consciousness isn’t a finite thing,” he explains enthusiastically. “What we’re experiencing isn’t necessarily the only thing on the spectrum.”
Torture World tackles several issues with urgency and passion, not the least of which is the struggle for equality and the resulting social unrest magnified in recent years. “As a white cisgender male, I’m not in a position to say that I am oppressed. It’s not my story to tell,” Harrison cautions. “But I have a huge problem with the disparity that occurs inside of this civilization that we occupy.” Gasparrini came up with the title for the EP. Once that was in place, Harrison took it as a creative cue for all of the song lyrics.
“I wrote all of the lyrics in the studio, as the instrumentals were basically finished when we got there,” he explains. “The first song I wrote was ‘Kingmaker,’ which is about QAnon, which I hate and find exhausting. It’s very thinly veiled racism and antisemitism, much of it recycled from generations past. It is extremely dangerous rhetoric propagated by these scam artists to make money. And it pisses me off.”
The EP’s title track blends atmospheric melodies with unrelenting heaviness, maneuvering swiftly between old-school death metal, uplifting hardcore, and double bass-fueled fury. “Womb” is as fast and severe as anything originating from the frozen forests of Scandinavia, swinging wildly back and forth between blackened death and slow, bludgeoning sludge. “Death Forgives No One” concludes the proceedings, with a progressive bent, equal parts driving and haunting, with an almost esoteric quality beneath it all.
“Torture World has a dual meaning. Some songs on the EP are extremely political, and there are some extremely personal songs,” Harrison points out. “Both things bleed into each other.”
It’s an approach to the lyrical side of the band that continues to apply to their music. Since the first time a punk rocker palm-muted a guitar, there’s been a debate about what constitutes “true” hardcore, crossover, thrash, metalcore, ad nauseam. GREAT AMERICAN GHOST is comfortably beyond that conversation. “I’m so sick of the whole subgenre thing,” says Harrison. “We’ve always been in this middle ground. Some people who listen to metal don’t see us as a metal band. We’ve never been a straight-up hardcore band. So, we don’t really care. I only care whether or not people get it. As long as they get it, or it changes them or touches them emotionally in some way? Call us whatever you want.”
PRESS
“Can you tell we really fucking love this band? Great American Ghost are severely fucking loveable: evidence suggests that the Boston quartet has discovered the secret equation for writing uniformly-excellent stampeding, corrosive metallic hardcore.”
- MetalSucks
“With every step, Great American Ghost are creating bigger and bigger bootprints in the modern hardcore scene. The Boston quartet play massive, no-frills punching music that doesn’t forsake thoughtful lyrics or dynamic guitars in the name of extremity. On top of that, their music also captures the low-end punch of nu-metal and slam, keeping the band undeniably couched in the heavy underground.”
- Kerrang!
“Tracks fly by like bullets, packed full of pissed-as-hell screams and guitars that sound like meat grinders. These young men have issues.”
- Punk News
“Great American Ghost is the epitome of Boston hardcore, and that’s a very good thing.”
- New Noise Magazine
“You may have heard the phrase: it’s not what you say but rather how you say it. Great American Ghost are very much that idiom. Both lyrically and instrumentally the band hit all the right notes… The honesty in the lyrics is beyond refreshing and certainly preferential on a person to person basis. But that’s what Everyone Leaves is: extremely personal. Always hateful. Always pissed. Everyone can leave but Great American Ghost are welcome to stay.”
- Metal Injection
LINEUP
Ethan Harrison – Vocals
Niko Gasparrini – Guitar
Davier Perez – Drums