Over half a decade on from the release of their debut album The Smothering Arms of Mercy, Melbourne progressive-death outfit Growth have returned with Remember Me As Fire, their first new music since 2020.
Growth began in 2017 as a reflective space for brothers Tristan Barnes (guitar/bass/artwork) Nelson Barnes (drums), and vocalist LF, later joined by Nick Rackham (bass) and Ben Boyle (guitar), to explore trauma, mental illness and grief without romanticising them. The project was never intended as catharsis for its own sake, but as a way to illustrate recovery in all its brutality. Not as linear progress, but as something fractured, cyclical and deeply human.
Remember Me As Fire begins precisely where The Smothering Arms of Mercy ended. Written from the perspective of existing below rock bottom, the track explores the moment where self-erasure feels easier than self-awareness and the violence required to step beyond that.
The line “I thought I had already fallen as far as I could go” is delivered with almost vile contempt, before giving way to a subtle shift in tone, a fragile, uneasy suggestion of possibility “a shadow with a dream to grasp the warmth of sunlight.”
