Misanthropy Pure

Misanthropy Pure is the third studio album by hardcore punk band Shai Hulud, released on May 26, 2008 in Europe (except in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, where it arrived on May 30) and May 27 in the U.S. through Metal Blade Records, the band's first record release by that label. It has been described as the blender between 1997's Hearts Once Nourished with Hope and Compassion and 2003's That Within Blood Ill-Tempered, by Shai Hulud's guitarist, Matt Fox:

The sound.. it's hard for me to answer it accurately, it would be better to ask somebody who is listening to it. If you ask me, when I listen to 'Hearts Once Nourished..' our first album, I think it's very rhythm based. It's very very melodic, but it's definitely more rhythm based. When you listen to 'That Within Blood Ill-Tempered', it's clearly more melody based... so a lot of my friends said: 'If you guys could combine the drive, the rock, and the aggression of "Hearts" and the structuring, the melody and the intelligence of "That Within Blood Ill Tempered", you might have my favorite album of all time.' So again, because I can never answer a question just directly, to answer your question directly, what we try to do is combine both albums. We wanted to make it smart, and heavy, we wanna make it sound great. We wanted to give something to people where they could groove along to it and rock for more than a second and a half without changing, but we also wanted to maintain some technical intelligent aspect, and the melodic nature of our last album. So if you take both those albums, throw them in a blender, I think you might have something that resembles 'Misanthrophy Pure'.

"'It's faster, slower, more metal, less metal, more rock, more progressive, and less progressive than anything we've ever done. It's like that movie 'Deep Blue Sea'. The tagline on the DVD box is 'Bigger. Faster. Smarter. Meaner.' That's how this record is. Is it the best thing we've ever done? I don't know. We'll leave that to those who listen.'"

A music video was made for the song "Misanthropy Pure", first shown on MTV2's Headbangers Ball on May 22, 2008.

Credits

 * Matt Mazzali - vocals
 * Matt Fox - guitar, producer
 * Matthew Fletcher - bass guitar
 * Andrew Gormley - drums
 * Greg Thomas - engineer, producer
 * Dave Quiggle - artwork
 * Recorded at Silver Bullet Studios in Burlington, CT
 * Mixed by Eric Rachel at Trax East