I've known Andrew Orlando since the ’90s. After his stint in Milhouse, he and I formed Black Army Jacket, beginning a friendship and musical relationship that has now somehow lasted close to three decades.
Hope Collapse came later. In 2005, Andrew and I started the band with bassist Pete Ciccotto of Milhouse and our former Black Army Jacket bandmate Dave Witte on drums. We released the Year of the Leper EP that year, but the band never made it to a full-length.
More than 20 years later, that's finally changing.
On October 30, Hope Collapse will release Age of Heathens, our 10-song debut album and first new record since that EP.
While Hope Collapse had been inactive, Andrew apparently never considered it completely finished. He held onto riffs from that period—some written in the same tuning we used on the EP—and continued returning to them over the years. Eventually, those fragments started becoming songs.
There was another, simpler reason he wanted to bring Hope Collapse back. “I also wanted to make another record with Carlos,” Andrew says. “We’ve been friends for a long time, and that friendship was a big part of why this album came together.”
This incarnation of Hope Collapse features an entirely new rhythm section: bassist Jeff Kaplan (Two Man Advantage, The Judas Iscariot) and drummer Anthony Corallo (Kill Your Idols, Short Leash, Sheer Terror). They didn't simply step into roles that had been vacant for two decades. Jeff's heavily distorted bass and Anthony's drumming helped give the new material its own personality and pushed the band somewhere different from where we left it in 2005.
That's important because none of us were interested in pretending the intervening years hadn't happened.
Andrew and I grew up on hardcore and metal, and 'Age of Heathens' pulls from a lot of music that has stuck with us: grindcore, ’90s metallic hardcore, thrash, and the stranger corners of heavy music. We're both lifelong Voivod nerds, which probably explains why some weirdness tends to creep in no matter what we're trying to write.
Andrew wanted the guitar work to be heavy and ugly but also unpredictable. Dissonance, angular riffs, and unexpected rhythmic turns run throughout the record, with the music moving between grind, metallic hardcore, and less easily defined territory.
“I wanted the riffs to be heavy, ugly, and unpredictable, yet retain their own identity,” he says. “Jesse Pintado, Piggy, Justin Broadrick, Keith Huckins, Mike De Lorenzo, Scott Hull, Aaron Melnick, and countless others shaped how I hear and approach heavy guitars.”
For me, the challenge was making sure the vocals didn't disappear inside all of that. My delivery on the album is gruff and growling, but I wanted the lyrics to have a strong sense of clarity. These days, I'm much less interested in hiding behind abstract imagery. If I'm screaming something at you, I want there to be a reason for it.
A lot of Age of Heathens deals with people being failed, manipulated, or damaged by systems meant to serve them. There are songs about institutional failure, abuse of power, religious exploitation, trauma, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior. “Discarded by Design,” for example, draws directly on my experiences in New York City's public school system during the ’80s and early ’90s.
I didn't deliberately set out to write a concept album. It was only after looking at the finished lyrics that I realized how often I had returned to people trapped in destructive systems—or sometimes trapped inside their own heads.
Making the album also reminded me how much of my life the hardcore community has shaped.
Age of Heathens was essentially made on two coasts. Anthony recorded the drums and bass at Chronic Death Studios on Long Island, and Andrew tracked his guitars with Tom Cavanagh at Deerhaven Studios, also on Long Island. Meanwhile, I recorded my vocals with Taylor Young at The Pit Recording Studio in Los Angeles.
I met Taylor through the hardcore scene here in LA, and we'd become friends before the idea of revisiting Hope Collapse entered the picture. When I approached him about the album, he was immediately on board and understood the disparate influences we were coming from.
Rather than trying to blast through all 10 songs in one marathon session, Taylor and I spread the vocals across a few days. That gave us time to really work through them—trying different deliveries, figuring out what each song needed, and making sure the words remained understandable without sacrificing the aggression.
I've recorded a lot of music over the years, and working with Taylor on these vocals was the best studio experience I've ever had. He also mixed Age of Heathens, with Brad Boatright at Audiosiege handling the mastering.
The record is getting an equally fitting home. Shawn and Tina Connell are releasing the vinyl through their label, Black Claw Records. Shawn's own history as a musician goes back through Pillsbury Hardcore, P/H\C, End to End, Process, and Charred Remains, so there was an immediate connection there. His lineage comes from the same kind of underground hardcore and extreme music that has always informed Hope Collapse, making Black Claw feel like a natural place for the record.
That familiar feeling carried over to the visual side of the record as well. Budos Band drummer Brian Profilio created the cover art, Philly Hardcore legend Justin Moulder contributed the back cover and insert photography, and Silent Majority's Tommy Corrigan handled the design and layout.
Looking at the finished album, I think that's one of the things I appreciate most about how it came together. From recording and mixing to the artwork and vinyl release, people connected to the communities Andrew and I have been part of for most of our lives made Age of Heathens.
I don't really think of Age of Heathens as an attempt to pick up where Hope Collapse left off in 2005. Too much has happened since then, musically and otherwise. It's simply what Hope Collapse sounds like now. And after nearly 30 years of making music together, in one form or another, I still get a kick out of hearing Andrew send me a fucked-up riff and wondering what I'm supposed to do over it.
Apparently, neither of us has figured out how to stop doing this yet.
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Age of Heathens will be released October 30 via Black Claw Records (vinyl) and Pax Aeturnum (digital).
Tagged: black army jacket, hope collapse, kill your idols, sheer terror, the judas iscariot
