Chicago’s self-proclaimed “neo-barbarians,” Ready for Death, are ready to smash your face in (metaphorically) with new album Pay With Your Face. Coming just a handful of years after their eponymous debut, Pay With Your Face is a certified assbeater, like you’ll hear on the title track, streaming below.
“Pay With Your Face” sees Ready for Death lean further into their punk-influenced strain of death/thrash, mixing in flavors of High on Fire, Black Flag and Eyehategod for good measure.
“Lyrically, ‘Pay With Your Face’ is meant to reflect a world where identity and value are boiled down to biometric data,” says vocalist Artie White. “In this dystopian present we’re all trying to survive in, our faces are scanned, monetized, and tracked forever. So, what looks like progress is really an erasure of self. Individuality is only useful for commerce, and your actual face is reduced to currency in a system built for control, profit, and ongoing Planetary War.
“Like the title track, the whole album gets into how society keeps sliding deeper into convenience-driven surrender. We voluntarily (and suicidally) hand over our freedom and identity. It’s modern sorcery minus the promise of power or wealth; just a spell we cast on each other that gradually melts us down for raw materials. Willingly trading our essential humanity for a future that’s collapsing right in front of us.”
Accompanying the new track is a video by Kris Baldwin, which really underscores the hellish, dystopian vibes depicted in the song. Check it out below and grab Pay With Your Face via Translation Loss before its June 27 release.
