You press the bruise, drive too fast, make yourself bleed, get real fucked up, isolate yourself—it can be hard to tell whether this behavior is a cycle or if it’s getting worse.
Besides a little Pig Destroyer here and there, I don’t listen to grindcore. I try it sometimes and hope for the best of the vicious insanity, but I know music can always get more extreme than this.
On "Sisyphean Life," Suffering Quota do more than just sound extreme—they sound good. The snare drum fires off beautifully, hollow and crisp; the fury-addled vocals layer lower and higher registers; and the guitar and bass rage with distortion and tone.
No doubt about it: the music is abrasive. So much so that I can’t tell if it’s better to listen to one or two songs and then cleanse the palate with something else or if you should immerse yourself.
The album’s description says it “draws on the idea of eternal return, paneling the endless push uphill with the recurring descent into depression and boredom of modern daily life.”
I don’t know how modern that is, and neither does the band. The title “Sisyphean Life” refers to the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus—a man, a king, condemned to push a massive boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down each time he nears the top. The idea that fruitless, repetitive labor was one of the worst things that could happen to you goes back a long time, some three-thousand years.
“Strain” opens the album with the vicious grindcore insanity fans like. But I was listening to “Cruel Rock” when I appreciated the crisp hollowness of the rapid-fire snare drum. The snare on “Roll Back Down” is really good, too.
“Dust” starts with the guitar riff before moving into beautifully patterned vocal layering. The vocal mirrors the guitar riffing, smearing the tops and bottoms in modernity.
“Change Course” quickly erupts into neck-twisting fury, then back to a slower riff, then a mid-tempo killer right at 2 minutes. It goes by fast, like a good song and all this life and death should.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus reframes Sisyphus as a symbol of human perseverance in an absurd universe. Camus imagines Sisyphus achieving a kind of existential victory by embracing the meaninglessness of his task. Sisyphus serves as a metaphor for the human condition—life is absurd and meaningless, but one can find quiet defiance and meaning simply by embracing his struggle and persevering.
But Sisyphus angered the gods and pissed off Zeus because he was an asshole on repeat, and his behavior was just getting worse. There is no victory in that.
"Sisyphean Life," released September 18, 2026, is the Groningen, Netherlands band’s fourth full-length record.
