CAFO

"CAFO" arrives like a machine becoming alive. The opening riff on Tosin Abasi's eight-string guitar is immediately disorienting in the best possible sense — the low end extends into register where rhythm and texture merge, where pitch becomes a physical event rather than a musical one. Animals as Leaders emerged from the technical metal underground around 2009, and this track remains one of the clearest demonstrations of what that scene could accomplish at its most focused. The odd-meter signatures cascade through the arrangement without ever feeling arbitrary — each time signature shift seems inevitable in retrospect, the music following its own internal logic rather than imposing complexity for display. The production is dense but disciplined: Javier Reyes's second guitar provides harmonic context and counterpoint while Abasi executes patterns that shouldn't be physically possible at the tempo they're played. Matt Garstka's drumming — technically not on the album recording, but the rhythmic architecture — matches the guitars with the kind of locked precision that creates the illusion of a single organism rather than multiple musicians. Emotionally, this is music of intensity and focus, not aggression for its own sake. The title references industrial agriculture, and there's something in the mechanical relentlessness of the music that earns that reference without becoming didactic about it. This is for headphones at high volume, for running or lifting or working through something that requires matching ferocity.