Released in March 2025, To What End is a record that is framed as a culmination: over two decades of Andrew Grant refining The Vomit Arsonist into one of the bleakest articulations of American Death Industrial, now “fully dismantled…into complete nothingness” across eight tracks. What’s striking is how literally that promise is kept.
Functioning as a solo project since the early age of 18, Grant has been releasing a varied yet consistent discography from labels across the globe. To What End stands at the latest full length from the project on the inimitable America label Cloister Recordings who has been responsible for a number of The Vomit Arsonist releases over the past decade – as well as other seminal Power Electronic, Noise & Post Industrial projects including a definite influence of Grant’s, Brighter Death Now.
The opening stretch establishes the album’s core tactic: pressure without movement. Sheets of greyed-out tone hang like damp fabric over everything, with percussive elements reduced to blunt impacts – less rhythm than the memory of rhythm. Grant doesn’t build tracks so much as he lets them congeal, a slow chemical failure rather than a compositional act. The album drifts into something almost static, but not in the meditative sense that dark ambient often promises. There’s no transcendence here, no aestheticized void. The textures are too clogged, too human in their decay. You can hear the edges fray. You can hear the system failing in real time. By the time the track “It’s Coming and You Can’t Stop It” arrives – arguably the closest the record gets to a traditional “peak” – the title reads less like threat and more like administrative notice. The track doesn’t explode; it thickens. Density replaces intensity. It’s suffocation by accumulation, not attack.
There’s a particular kind of cruelty in how To What End refuses escalation. Not because it lacks force – quite the opposite. The Vomit Arsonist has spent decades refining a language of psychic abrasion, and here that language is stripped of even the pretense of climax. Eight tracks, each circling the same terminal diagnosis, each denying you the release that lesser “Death Industrial” records still-quietly, almost apologetically-permit. What you’re left with is not “harshness” but erosion. This is where the record distinguishes itself from the wider power electronics continuum. Where many artists still trade in confrontation-volume as dominance, shock as currency – To What End feels post-confrontational. It assumes you already understand the violence. It’s no longer interested in proving anything. Cloister Recordings has built a catalog around this kind of absolutism, but this is amongst one of their most distilled statements: not apocalypse as spectacle, but apocalypse as maintenance condition – ongoing, unresolvable, structurally embedded.
Seemingly a shift from earlier Vomit Arsonist work: the abandonment of momentum as a meaningful tool. Even in his more oppressive records, there was still a sense of trajectory – decline, collapse, something. Here, the decline has already happened. The album begins after the event.
That’s ultimately what To What End does best: it removes the last remaining illusions of narrative from this kind of music. No catharsis, no confrontation, no transcendence. Even despair feels too expressive for what’s happening here. Only a limited number of CD Digipacks remaining out of an initial press of 300 from the label, which contains all original artwork from Grant can be purchased directly here.
