Issue 9: Blacklisted – Heavier Than Heaven, Lonelier Than God

On feeling like you don’t belong.

Part I: Shoes and pegs

In the grand scheme of things, this author likes to think of himself as a fairly well-adjusted person. As the years roll on, the demands of performative normality seem to weigh less on me than they did in youth.

But the weight is not forgotten.

It started, of course, in school, where most misery takes root. Even though the daily educational machinations were fairly menial, the human interfacing around the edges never made sense to me. The social hierarchies, the arcane rules of interaction – it all seemed (and still seems, present tense) to be so highly ritualised that I frankly couldn’t make much sense of it, nor did I feel the need to in the first place.

Not to say that I was different, but my brain just seems to function in an unconventional way. Sure, I was a despicable little toad at that time in my life, but I’m confident enough in the self-examination of my morals to know that my growing pains weren’t all self-inflicted.

‘Not belonging’ in the broad sense of the phrase is a hard feeling to expound upon. It’s the extreme mental discomfort of the entire world feeling like a shoe that’s a size too small. It’s feeling like the inside of your brain itches in a way you never quite can seem to scratch. It’s like you’re a square peg expected to traverse a round hole, but that hole stretches out into eternity, with at the end only the promise of expiration.

This is not about depression, but rather, in my case, the cause of it. It’s about feeling like you don’t belong and that you’re the only one carrying this. A weight that’s impossible to shed and seemingly just as impossible to share.

Except that last part is not entirely true. Misery loves company.

And I love Blacklisted.

Ironically, much like with Trial and Shelter, I latched onto Blacklisted at the tail-end of their career. Their last full-length LP, When People Grow, People Go, caught me from the first track, Insularized:

"Surrender’s just a word for dropping your guard

when theres no one left to harm"

Coming to the band later than most, I found it to be a refreshing take on the hardcore genre, which in 2015, when it was released, I felt was quite stale. Regardless, the discourse intrigued me; I suppose if people expected more from Blacklisted, they must have had quite the impact. And that’s when Heavier Than Heaven, Lonelier Than God landed on my radar.

(Let me be clear here: When People Grow is an amazing album and all throughout my appreciation of this band, I’ve found their later catalogue to be most intriguing of all. More on that later.)

Part II: Experiencing extreme unease through novel means

These songs are about a very particular kind of pain. The kind where you feel trapped in your body, trapped in relationships both romantic and platonic, trapped in a society and there doesn’t seem to be a way to ameliorate that pain.

It’s not depression – at not least not in the way as it’s understood by the mainstream. The feelings described on Heavier Than Heaven are more nuanced than your typical 'I can’t cope' fair. The lyrics – and let’s be clear here: there are very few bands that could hold a torch to Blacklisted’s lyrics when it comes to depth and nuance while still having very sharp barbs – describe discomfort but at the same time confidence: This world is not built for me, but fuck the world anyway. I have a better outlook, a sharper vision, and I will take that pain each day.

Because frankly, accepting and living a lie is a worse punishment.

"Was it always like this?

Finding new ways to clench my fist"

This approach would not work without honesty. Brutal honesty. The kind of honesty you only see in an open wound. Honesty with oneself at the core of it all, but from that point also honesty about the people around you, both the ones you love and the ones that get in the way:

“My friends are all trusting a little too much

Giving themselves away to each other

There's a new one every month

Featuring a future single mother”

It’s a biting example of personal honesty above courteous kindness, of feeling like you just can’t bear the performative friendship of the "How are you?" – "I’m fine" kind. Few who’ve asked the first are truly looking for any answer other than the second. A papier mâché relationship that would melt under the first signs of stress.

Of course, this type of honesty is never that interesting if the barrel of the blame gun is always pointed outwards. On Heavier Than Heaven, it is also firmly introspective. How could it not? If you feel like you can’t connect with the people closest to you, you don’t just find fault with them.

"In my life there's no truth, there's just mountains of lies.

Search for identity, but wear a disguise

I run and I run and I run and I run and I hide

I'm complicated, so frustrating, I know you hate it, but I just can't fake it"

It’s all quite a bit different compared to your 'brotherhood unity rah rah' standard hardcore fare, but then, musically, Blacklisted never seemed to strive to fit in anyway. Perhaps it was simply impossible for them, considering the music they made.

Oh, hardcore is where this band started, no doubt, but it was not content to stay in that box.

Usually it’s No One Deserves To Be Here More Than Me that’s hailed (and reviled by those with lesser opinions) as the big shift in the band’s sound – from straight-ahead hardcore punk to a slower, more grungy sound. Yet, listen to Heavier Than Heaven and between the aggressive loudness the first grungier notes already ring, particularly in A Side-enders Memory Layne and Circuit Breaker.

It never ceases to amaze how a combination of tones can convey a complicated emotion (that I struggle to even put into words), but Blacklisted knows how to weave them just so between the words that they form a beautiful stifling blanket of crippling anxiety – take that as a compliment.

Though I love No One…, it’s the balance the band strikes on Heavier Than Heaven between that trusted hardcore foundation and a new world that tickles my fancy.

Part III: We suffer, but why?

The first of the four Noble Truths in Buddhism is that everyone suffers. We all do, in larger or smaller quantities, and the ones who think this isn’t true are in denial. To live is to suffer. And while I refuse to subscribe to the notion that suffering is a prerequisite for art, it can serve as a fertile ground for artistic outing to take root in.

There is much suffering behind Blacklisted’s music. There is a deep-seated, nagging type of pain that fuels the general sentiment this band put forward over the years. The beauty of what the members have done, however, is not in communicating pain in a broad sense, but in being able to distill it into a very specific, very particular kind of suffering: the feeling of believing this world will never accept your particular kind of chosen existence and will wear you down until that choice has been filed off and you simply exist.

Blacklisted was quite a popular band in the hardcore scene, so one could assume that this specific kind of permanent unease resonates with a sizeable group of people.

It certainly did with this lowly music writer.

One part of that was experiencing something different in music, a new shade of the same beloved but stale scene. But more than that, it was recognition in the self-destructive nature of the band’s songs.

Yes, we can live, we can throw ourselves down the chute haphazardly and try to come out the other end somewhat unscathed. Some people learn early on how to navigate this trajectory smoothly. But some of us will never succeed. Between pride and shallow hope for a better way, we try to make the trip on our own terms.

We can’t be sure those terms are the right ones. But at least we’re not alone. Blacklisted taught us that.