News
All three members of celebrated post-hardcore band Coliseum – Ryan Patterson, Kayhan Vaziri and Carter Wilson — have come together again under the moniker C.L.S.M. and recently announced the release of a brand new album titled Infinity Shit. While this is all three members of Coliseum, it’s not technically a new Coliseum album. 10 songs of blistering hardcore with unhinged vocals that deal with the chaotic insanity of everyday life in a world overrun with greed, self-infatuation, instant gratification, and ever-deepening class divisions, Infinity Shit is the perfect punk record for this moment and a hammer that shatters the facade of our daily reality.
An LP borne from enduring friendship, a desire to continue to create music together, and a seething rage that is best expressed through ferocious hardcore punk, Infinity Shit is led by "Hammer Through The Windshield," a song that presents itself as the album’s mission statement and a clear bridge to Coliseum's catalog. Inspired by singer, guitarist and primary songwriter Ryan Patterson’s daily moments of rage and daydreams of class warfare, as well as the racist fear-mongering and geographical division that takes place in Louisville, KY, “Hammer Through The Windshield” finds Patterson imagining themselves smashing luxury cars with a sledgehammer.
One of the quintessential underground bands of the early millennium, Coliseum was founded in 2003 by singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter Ryan Patterson. After releasing their debut album in 2004, Coliseum blazed an unrelenting trail of scorched earth across the globe, playing just shy of 1000 shows and releasing five full-length albums. Coliseum went on indefinite hiatus in late 2015 not long after releasing their fifth album, Anxiety’s Kiss.
In the years since the hiatus, the three members of Coliseum — Patterson, bassist Kayhan Vaziri, and drummer Carter Wilson — focused on their separate current bands. Patterson went on to form post-punk group Fotocrime, Vaziri continued with grind metal act Yautja, and Wilson fronts slowcore band Null. The trio remained close friends and their desire to make music together again led to secretly working on a new album. While Coliseum’s later albums were post-punk and noise rock-influenced post-hardcore, the new batch of songs Patterson began writing were raw hardcore punk that harkened back to Coliseum’s early D-beat days but with even faster tempos and more raging riffs. In bursts of creative energy, they wrote and recorded these songs at Patterson’s House of Foto studio and at Wilson’s home studio before handing the tracks over to Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, Career Suicide) to mix and Brad Boatright (From Ashes Rise) to master.
"Carter, Kayhan and I are regularly in contact, often talking about new movies and music we like and keeping up to date on each other's lives and bands,” Patterson says. “While Coliseum ended activity in 2015, for us the connection and friendship we had is still very much alive and we continued to desire to make music together. A jolt of inspiration hit me in 2021 and I started writing demos of fast and intense D-beat and skank beat hardcore songs then sent them to Carter and Kayhan. We were all excited about the music and the idea of working together so we made this album, purely based on the immediate creative spark and our long-term friendship and collaboration.”
As such, Infinity Shit was never intended to be a Coliseum album because it didn't feel like the next stylistic step after Anxiety's Kiss, but it was the three of them and undeniably part of the same DNA. Mysterious and a bit confusing, C.L.S.M. succeeds in reflecting the new project’s intent: just as the music is faster and leaner, so is the name.
