Alitila – Spruce (2021)
A1 Stripping
A2 This spruce
A3 Inside looking back
A4 Holding ways
B1 Clearcutting
B2 To yield
B3 When you look inside
B4 Post umbra
Cassette, limited to 100 copies
Release date 28.3.2025
Spruce is the debut album from US/Finland-based trio Alitila. Based around themes of nature, somewhat ironic given its roots in industrial and extreme metal, the release has been years in the making and arrives with a scathing, sometimes danceable, presence of its own.
Against a backdrop of low drones, harsh synth, weighted beats, melodic flashes and chaotic screams, a Finnish producer and a conceptualist and US-based vocalist explore spaces mechanically churning and emotionally dense in kind, colliding the organic and the inorganic in a willful desire to create a singular, multifaceted sonic identity.
By combining diverse influences, pushing each other to be weirder, harsher, meaner — sometimes prettier — ALITILA emerge with this debut release likewise punishing and immersive. Themes of chaos inside and out transpose onto visions of the natural world affected by anthropocene shortsightedness, resulting in a progressive brutality not entirely animal but beyond common software exploration and looking to plunge further.