Make yourselves uncomfortable with Ho99o9
"Dead Bodies in the Lake"
The third and final in the series was for track “Day of Vengeance”, which showed the New Jersey pair masked and dismembering a body before shoving blood-soaked organs and body parts into a suitcase. One half of the duo, The OGM, stated in an interview; “You gotta make people uncomfortable.”
With their rabid live performances and a vicious amalgamation of hardcore punk, warped electronics and aggressive hip hop, bandmates The OGM and Eaddy set out to shock and intimidate from the start. Their new mixtape, Dead Bodies in the Lake, begins with the sound of two kids discussing a loaded gun “hidden under the bed”. Guitars shriek and scream to life over unsettling rumbling and nightmarish samples and the duo rasp: “you can run but you can’t hide… you hear my bullet scrape across the kitchen”.
The mixtape is split into two ‘sides’, and while there are song name, there are no distinguishable starts or finishes to the tracks. Instead, the first 25 minutes is one unrelenting slab of aggression which aims for the messy middle ground between Death Grips and Bad Brains, while namechecking Metallica and Judas Priest. Lyrics that can be made out take their cue from Gravediggaz and Three-6-Mafia; bloody imagery drenched in violence and sexual savagery.
On ‘side B’ it takes all of 32 seconds for things to meltdown into complete chaos of venom and loathing amid thundering riffs and pummelling punk guitars. A few moments later comes the warning: “there’s no way in, no way out … axe in my hand… I can watch you bleed.”
Eaddy and The OGM's declaration that this mixtape is “soundtrack to the mass amount of corpses (found and unfound) located in a large body of water surrounded by land” is clearly meant to be comical. But there’s no doubting Ho99o9 are able to instill genuine fear and discomfort in their listeners.
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