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May 12, 2025 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Madi Ellis

Chicago-based band Slow Mass debuted in 2016 with their Treasure Pains EP and followed with their 2018 full-length album, On Watch, 2020’s sophomore record, Music for Rest, and 2024’s Drift Themes EP. In that time, their line-up expanded into a rotating seven-piece collective, and their sound sprawled in new directions, taking dreamy, gauzy, and crushingly heavy stylistic turns.

Later this week, the band are set to return with their latest album, Low on Foot, which they’ve been teasing with a string of new singles, “Hogtied,” “Blur,” and “Freeze Frame”. Today, they’re offering a final taste of the album with another single, “Hell is Earth,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Hell is Earth” captures the record’s balance between roiling, turbulent aesthetics and hazy beauty. The drums and layered guitars give the track a massive and intimidating presence, crashing forth in tense, swirling rhythms. At moments the layered mounds of guitars recall bleary shoegaze textures, while at the track’s climax, the band descends into harsh, spiked bursts of distortion that feel closer to noise rock. Amidst all of the stormy clamor and unending forward motion, the vocals shine with a gentle melodic glamor, a burst of warm color against the bleak scrawl of the instrumentation. Meanwhile, the lyrics obliquely reference a culture of lies and artifice, constructed while the world burns: “You burned it down / Scorched the earth / While it spun around / And you fend them off / Feed them all / Then hit a wall / For one more framed form / Make a stage of the dirt / Then cover it all.”

The band’s Dave Collis says of the track, “‘Hell is Earth’ is about frustration with performative activism. During the first Trump administration and the preceding pandemic, a culture of social media attention-seeking accelerated, becoming deeply integrated into peoples’ visions of their own self-worth.

Whether it be MSNBC reporters dragging out a single, nondescript page from a Trump tax return into a meaningless two-hour ‘emergency newscast’ or be it individuals adding, then removing, Ukrainian and Palestinian flags from their Instagram bios based on topical upheavals (our guitarist’s wife lost her brother in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war), I felt a deep frustration and disgust with seeing how we as a society use human suffering and weaponized anger for instant gratification and personal gain.”

Check out the song and video below, along with their upcoming tour dates. Low on Foot is out May 16th via Landland Colportage.

Tour Dates

05/23 Minneapolis, MN @ Zhora Darling^%

05/24 Chicago, IL @ Palisade^%

05/25 Chicago, IL @ Palisade^%

07/25 Cleveland, OH @ No Class*

07/26 Pittsburgh, PA @ Brillobox*#

07/27 Pontiac, MI @ Pike Room*

% w/ Prize Horse

^ w/ Downward

* w/ Edhochuli

# w/ Genital Shame