Now that protest music exists only as a form of personal ritual, hedonism is the only exorcism, and artists stifle internal impulses in pursuit of career mobility, METAL ROUGE solemnly meditates on contemporary society’s willingness to accept what many before fought to stop. Soft Erase is a collection of monochromatic machine-pulses ridden into the blank heart of single-take live excursions, a haze of modulated delay and de-synchronized loops, of strings hit endlessly in the hope that meaning may appear. Ritual chants give way to berserk guitar overload. Dark vamping leads from nowhere to nowhere, burning negation and dismissal as righteous fuel. Hazy prayers for rain spill out in the merciless desert heat, unspooling into an extended fake-kraut meditation featuring GILES MILLER on a beautifully unhurried alto sax. Cover art based on the censored art of Italian street artist BLU. Edition of 300.