No Terror In The Bang: Retch

It’s 2025, and a lot of people are starting the year angry. I don’t write about politics very often in these posts, so I’ll just say that I’m not feeling very hopeful about the state of the world right now. What I do write about in these posts is music and how important it is in understanding the world around us. If I could make one New Year’s Resolution for everyone out there who does not find solace, understanding, and joy through music it would be that this can change for them. Only in this change can the world start to heal because there is no healing in violence, fear, and hatred. This means there is no healing in modern-day politics because it seems that our current world-wide politics are all founded on violence, fear, and hatred.

So, what does this have to do with the French progressive metal band No Terror In The Bang? The reason I chose this artist, album, and song to start the new year is that when I am feeling angry, I listen to metal to release that negative energy. This is the same reason that most metal bands play metal and the reason that so many people around the world listen to metal. The album title Heal is about as on the nose as this sentiment can be. This release contains ten tracks focused on subject matter that female vocalist Sofia Bortoluzzi clearly believes are in need of healing. This metal release will not make many year end lists. I listened to a lot of metal in 2024, and there are definitely many that are of the highest quality in styles such as Death, Brutal, Grindcore, Extreme, Groove, and the dozens of other subgenres that people all over the world listen to religiously. I could spend weeks focusing on releases of those types, but I will present this one song by this one relatively unknown band to represent them all. The band’s name (No Terror In The Bang) refers to Alfred Hitchcock’s quote that when making a suspenseful film the terror is found in the scenes leading up to the final event. In many ways, this is how our modern life feels – full of tension every day as we fearfully wait, unable to stop the next horrifying event that we know is coming. Perhaps listening to some metal will help some of us release the fear and anger caused by a world that appears to revel in this tension.

To learn more about No Terror In The Bang, check out their website.

To listen to all of the songs of the day, check out the Radio Faux Show Song of the Day playlist.

• Best of 2024