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Angry Norwegians ATTAN Break Down the 9-Track Vitriolic Attack of Their Début Album ‘End Of’ [Exclusive Feature]

We asked Norway’s Attan to break down the 9-track vitriolic attack of their début album End Of. Featured within: televangelists, going nuts, and guitars for four-year-olds.

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Far removed from its genre purist past, hardcore has morphed into a melting pot where almost anything goes. It’s often the bands from far-flung lands that have the most fun with experimenting; Norway’s Attan being one potent example, embroiling d-beat, black metal, groove metal, noise rock, and who knows what else in their vitriolic attacks. The group happen to also be quite loquacious, so we asked bassist Fritz to break down their début End Of. Featured within: televangelists, going nuts, and guitars for four-year-olds.

01. “The Burning Bush Will Not Be Televised”
– Normally we don’t like to go to much into the meaning of our lyrics, as we want to leave that to the listener. But with this one, we just wanted to go full steam ahead with a proper rager about a certain television preacher/money grabbing scumbag that goes by the name of Jan Hanvold.

02. “Feed The Primates”
– Lyrically, this track makes an effort to apply the theories of radical behaviorism on a global scale. There’s a term called a reinforcement trap, and at times it seems like that term alone could explain everything that’s going wrong with our species. While writing it, the groovy part in the middle and end grew into a tribute to Vinnie Paul (Pantera), something that came back to us quite tragically when he passed away right before we released the track as a single.

This isn’t a zoo, “Feed the Primates” is a belter!


03. “On Hands And Knees”
– Our d-beat/shuffle groove/black metal-hybrid thingy. This one came together over a few years of collecting dead darlings. We ended up just going nuts in the middle of it and it just clicked. When in doubt, go fucking nuts!

04. “In Our Image (This is Love)”
– A rather pissed off song about the way we go on ruining the future for our own children. Our own children?! Knowingly!?! If there is a designer behind this mess, that thing has very little to be proud of.

05. “SoMe Riefenstahl”
– This one is about new technology in the wrong hands. It has happened so many times before, and, with the rise of social media, we’re seeing it happen again. Quite fittingly the main riff in the track had ”Caveman riff” as working title.

End Of was released via Fysisk Format on September 7, 2018.

06. “Black Liquid Marrow”
– The perceptive listener would notice that we recorded and released this one before. When the time came to record the album, we had originally planned another song in its place, but it didn’t work out. We knew “Black Liquid Marrow” would fit in with what we wanted to do as far as an overall feeling for the record, and we were always on the fence about the first recording of the song. So, we decided to try it in there, and it worked out really well.

07. “Catalyst Devine”
– This one was tricky to write. We had the chorus and a few other parts but it took some time to make sense of it all. There are a lot of different influences coming together in this song, so we had to break down a lot of mental barriers to make it happen.

08. “Ghostwriters”
– Maybe the most relentless track we have ever written. We wanted to make it feel overwhelming, like lava swallowing you slowly and burning you to a crisp. The lyrics for such a song just had to deal with religious extremism and its obvious philosophical shortcomings.

09. “End Of.”
– We wanted to end the record with a monument. Something extensive and dynamic that would make it very clear that this was the very end of the record (and absolutely everything else). The track does its work on many levels in music and lyrics both, and I think we all feel like we grew a lot as a band writing it. Fun fact: The main riff, despite being quite massive, was written on my four-year-old’s guitalele, which is a ukulele-sized acoustic guitar for kids. It sounded pretty heavy on that thing, so we knew that it would be massive with the full band blasting it out.

Few things are darker and more evil than “Black Liquid Marrow”.

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