In the process of promoting NO GODS, ONLY MONSTERS, two things happened to lead us here:

1. I remastered the early All Hallow's Evil albums
2. I spent a lot of time on social media

There was a solid decade in which I did not listen to any of the pre-2006 All Hallow's Evil albums, which allowed them to become something different in my mind. They were made in a much uglier time for me and I was a much uglier person too. So I didn't think about them or that time very much until one day, spurred by a couple of conversations I had, I dug out an old hard drive and listened to them. Though a lot of the lyrics make me cringe all the way to the deepest pit of my being, there was a certain energy and fire to even the shittiest sounding recording. There's something about cobbling together really angry music on equipment that was never meant to deal with it that adds a little magic to the proceedings.

In the process of trying to make those albums sound presentable without ruining what made them special, I found that I really liked a lot of the material. Somewhat paradoxically, this was because I could both hear it for what it was--the scared rantings of an awkward kid with an uncertain future--and because I remembered what they sounded like in my head.

The idea for THE GRIFTED AGE came to me while I was playing SHOVEL KNIGHT on my Switch. SHOVEL KNIGHT is most assuredly not a grift and is in fact a tremendous value and one of my favorite games ever. It's also a tribute to 8-bit platformers in the way you remember them, rather than the way that they were. Playing it made me wonder if I could do something like that for the old All Hallow's Evil sound. But could I get angry enough to do it?

That brings me to social media. I dove back into social media pretty hard while promoting NO GODS, ONLY MONSTERS, the All Hallow's Evil album I put out in 2019. It was worth it, being that NO GODS became the most popular album of the All Hallow's Evil "Bandcamp Era" (not to be confused with the previous "Mp3.Com" and "MySpace" eras), but it occasionally felt like drinking poison for tips. When I think back on the internet I used to love, I think back to maybe 1999-2000, right when the first dot com bubble was about to burst. No one had really figured out how to make money on the internet so it was not yet choked to death by algorithms. It was just a bunch of people having a real dumb time in their school's computer lab or at home after the family went to sleep.

Now everyone knows how to make money on the internet: grift. With wildly irresponsible claims put on the same level and given the same heft as the most sober statement of fact, there's a lot of money in telling people what they want to hear. And so when it was time to get angry, I just went to Facebook and followed a few links some older family members were passing around. And here we are!

Thus I present to you THE GRIFTED AGE, a streamlined vision of what All Hallow's Evil sounded like in my head all those years ago, but inspired by our current state of constant grift. A small scream into a void where algorithms make more money in a day than most of us will ever see in a lifetime. Let the party begin!