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Music

Step Into The Body's Latest Nightmare, "To Know and To Hide"

Listen to the Portland duo's harrowing, mechanized contribution to the Adult Swim Singles Program.

The Body has long trafficked in a very specific brand of horror. The duo—made up of two of the friendliest, most Courtney Love-loving​ malcontents you ever did meet—have become frighteningly adept at invoking discomfort, and summoning a shivery, dread sense of malfeasance. Listening to one of their (many, ceaseless) recordings is an excellent way to give yourself the creeps, and to unconsciously start thinking that  something bad is out there,… and that it's coming for you.

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That being said, The Body's latest aural transgression is no exception."To Know and To Hide" is their contribution to the ongoing Adult Swim Singles Program (a series of free downloads to which their similarly nihilistic pals Thou have also contributed), and is just as horrifying as one might expect from The Body in 2016.

The short, punishing tune is at its rancid heart an industrial nightmare, pitch-black and unrelenting. The music itself is fully mechanized, with the only organic, semi-human touch found in the drum kit's somber thuds. Violent howls, booming crashes, and scraping, snapping noise populate the expanse, the lyrics are utterly unintelligible but palpably wretched, and the overall result is utterly hellish in a way that only these two specific people can pull off.

They told Noisey, "The title comes from a poem by Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva. We recorded at machines with magnets in Rhode Island with official/unofficial third and fourth members, Keith Souza and Seth Manchester who also played keyboards on this. 'What is the main thing in love? To know and to hide. To know about the one you love and to hide that you love. At times the hiding (shame) overpowers the knowing (passion). The passion for the hidden — the passion for the revealed."

Listen below. Welcome to Hell.

Kim Kelly has got the shivers on Twitter.