Absolute Darkness have put out Snake Oil, and the painkillers in it are not a metaphor. Guitarist Douglas Vetter II grew up around relatives on pain management, and lost one of his closest friends to it.
He remembers learning as a child to make himself "as small as possible" in that house. The song is also a goodbye to the friend he could not help. "There is help out there for people who need it, and this song is to shed light on a much bigger problem that people choose to turn a blind eye to, the opioid crisis."
It is the first complete song Vetter has contributed to the band, written with singer and guitarist Ron Dorn, and it puts the Bay Area thrash they come from next to more open sections so the subject has somewhere to sit. Instead of a performance video they cut a sequence from selected footage, to keep the words at the centre.
Witness to a Dying World, out 23 October, is their second album and the first written entirely by the current line-up.